A common happening on the split screens of Doordarshan and private news every few weeks is of rows of nervous young recruits, a huge LED backdrop and the Prime Minister seemingly handing over appointment letters. That ritual turned 10 on Saturday. During the 20th edition of Rozgar Mela, PM Narendra Modi issued more than 51,000 appointment letters, bringing the total number of government appointments under the scheme to 12.75 lakh since its inception in 2022.

This time, though, it was his assertion that India's growing web of Free Trade Agreements had now become a direct pipeline into private-sector jobs for the nation's youth that set off the real debate.

"India signed 40 Free Trade Agreements. For the first time, the Modi has linked trade diplomacy to jobs in his address to the gathering, calling it "the new doors of possibilities for our youth" that are opening. The records of the Commerce ministry present a different but no less interesting picture: India has inked 16 bilateral and regional trade deals, nine of which in the last six years, with 38 countries with a combined import basket of nearly 12 trillion dollars. It doesn't just mean the difference between counting country relationships and counting agreements it reflects the importance of the FTA as part of the government's employment messaging in a politically charged year.

The economics is not without content when you take off the rhetoric. Despite the troubles faced by global supply chains due to tariff wars and shipping delays, India managed to see record combined goods and services exports of 863.1 billion dollars at the end of FY26 as compared to 776.4 billion dollars three years earlier. Merchandise exports alone reached 441.8 billion dollars, and about 40.5 percent of that (179.1 billion dollars) was exported to countries with which India now has preferential trade access.

Under the UAE deal, Indian exports to the UAE were doubled from 16.7 billion dollars to 37.4 billion dollars in 4 years and the bilateral trade crossed the 100 billion dollar mark with a target of 200 billion dollars by 2032. Shipments almost doubled as well, increasing from 4 billion to 7.3 billion dollars, under the Australia pact. The EFTA deal with Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which only entered into force last October, has already produced almost 8,000 certificates of origin and a rare enforceable promise 100 billion dollars of European investment in the first fifteen years of the agreement and a million jobs as a result.

The architecture Modi is referring to is now the widest since liberalisation, thanks to the UK's CETA, under which 99 percent of Indian goods now flow duty-free, and the just-concluded EU negotiation, dubbed in trade circles the "mother of all deals.

But the big unanswered question is whether it is ensured by greater market access for exporters that pay cheques will appear for job seekers, and the labour data is filled with real caution. According to the PLFS, the unemployment rate for the country was at 5.1 percent on current weekly status basis in March 2026 while unemployment in the urban areas was significantly higher than in the rural areas.

The official unemployment rate for young people (between 15 and 29 years old) is already very close to 10 percent, and independent youth unemployment trackers like CMIE put the figure in the 20s when discouraged job seekers are included. 15-24 people make up 25% of the total Indian population, and 25% of them are not in education, employment or training.

Against that background, an FTA-driven trade surplus of gems, textiles, leather, pharmaceuticals and engineering goods can surely expand the factory floors and the hiring of well-trained labour in the back offices of the labour intensive clusters from Tiruppur to Surat but, what is a long and winding road is the transition from the tariff concession to actual, gainful, skill-matching jobs for a population in which nearly 40 per cent of young graduates are unable to secure their first real job.

That is where the more nuanced, less partisan criticism of the Rozgar Mela format has always been not that job fairs don't help, but that headline figures and trade-pact announcements aren't enough to replace the work of skilling systems that would match people up to the jobs the pacts create.

India's issue is not so much the lack of job opportunities, as it is the lack of employability, that is, candidates who may be certified, but are not trained for the jobs that these FTAs are supposed to create, and the lack of workers who are trained for the exact job roles that are sought by employers.