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Skilled trades behind India's growth story
This article is authored by Partha Basu, MD, Ashirvad by Aliaxis.
Here is a number worth pondering, not because it should alarm us, but because of what it reveals: Nearly two out of every three unemployed young Indians today hold a degree. A recent report found that the share of graduates among India's unemployed youth has climbed from 46% in 2017 to 67% now, even as fewer than one in ten male graduates land a permanent salaried job within a year of finishing their degree. Meanwhile, walk onto any construction site, industrial park or data centre campus, and you will hear a very different complaint from every contractor and facilities head: We cannot find enough certified electricians, HVAC technicians and plumbers. Put the two together, and India isn't short of jobs or short of talent. It has simply been pointing a generation of bright young people in the wrong direction, one engineering college and one B.Com degree at a time. That is a solvable problem and solving it may be one of the more exciting opportunities in front of us this decade.
I have spent over three decades in manufacturing and infrastructure, the last several running one of India's leading water management and plumbing solutions companies, and I watch this play out from both sides. I meet young graduates, articulate, qualified on paper, who have been job hunting for a year or two, holding out for a desk they were promised a degree would guarantee. I also meet plumbers and electricians in their twenties turning down work because there is simply too much of it. This is the clearest, most fixable gap in India's youth employment story right now, and on World Youth Skills Day, it deserves to be named plainly and treated as the opportunity it is.
Part of the reason this gap persists is that we have spent two decades telling an entire generation that a desk job is the only dignified destination, while the fastest-growing part of the job market has sat in plain sight, unglamorous and undersold. The very AI boom dominating our headlines is quietly creating a boom of its own, in plumbing, wiring and welding. Data centres need round-the-clock power. Their cooling systems need someone who actually knows how to fix them at two in the morning. Factories full of robots still need human hands to install and maintain those robots. I see this constantly, in the specifications our channel partners now ask for, in the certified installers our distributors are scrambling to hire, often faster than we can supply them.
The numbers bear this out. An analysis of over 50 million job postings found that blue-collar job volumes in India grew 93% between 2022 and 2026. Electrician postings are up 242%, HVAC roles up 200%, and demand for robotics technicians has jumped by more than 500%. Randstad India's leadership calls this a labour flip, where hands-on technical roles are beginning to out-earn many entry-level office jobs. Set that against India's youth unemployment rate, stubbornly in double digits through 2026, and the opportunity is hard to miss: A large pool of talented young jobseekers, and a rapidly growing pool of technical roles waiting to be filled, if we simply point them toward each other.
The government has read this shift well. The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana has trained well over 1.6 crore candidates across more than 35 sectors since 2015, its current phase now extended to December 2026 with an even more ambitious target ahead. A 2020 NITI Aayog evaluation found roughly 94% of employers surveyed were willing to hire PMKVY-certified candidates over uncertified ones. Roughly 70% of the 90% new jobs India adds by 2030 will sit in the blue-collar segment. Put plainly, the next decade of Indian employment stands to be won on the shop floor and the job site, a genuinely exciting prospect for a country with as young a workforce as ours.
Look at the money, and the case sharpens further. India's mechanical, electrical and plumbing services market is closing in on $ 13 billion, and globally the industry is on track to nearly double by the mid-2030s. In some of our metros, skilled tradespeople already outearn software professionals, unthinkable to my generation, when an engineering degree felt like the only ticket to financial security. That shift is good news for any young person willing to bet on a trade: the odds, and the earnings, are increasingly in their favour.
None of this happens on its own, and government schemes alone cannot move fast enough, which is exactly where industry has a role to play. Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) remain the backbone of vocational education, but plumbing in particular has a peculiar problem. Most plumbers in India still learn on the job, passed down informally, with no exposure to modern materials or safety standards. I have seen this gap up close, and closing it is one of the more meaningful things our industry can do, because a well-trained plumber changes outcomes that outlast any single job. This is precisely the gap a growing number of industry-backed skilling efforts are now closing. One initiative I have watched closely runs a mobile training unit that travels from town to town, offering free, hands-on plumbing training under expert mentorship, right where young people already live and work, rather than expecting them to wait for a government seat to open up. It is a small, unglamorous model, but exactly the kind of intervention youth skilling needs with training that meets people where they are, built around real industry standards, and free of cost so opportunity is never rationed by geography or income.
So, on World Youth Skills Day, my hope is a simple one. Let us stop treating vocational training as the consolation prize for young people who couldn't get into college and start treating it as a first choice with better odds. Parents, schools and career counsellors can help by saying this out loud to sixteen-year-olds, not just policymakers in white papers. A certified trade today offers strong, fast, well-paying employment, often faster than a large share of undergraduate degrees. AI can write code. It cannot lay a pipe, wire a building, or fix a machine on a factory floor. The opportunity in front of India right now is enormous, a young, energetic workforce and an economy that badly needs its hands. If we get the message to our youth right, the trades will not just employ India's next generation, they will help build the India of the next decade.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Partha Basu, MD, Ashirvad by Aliaxis.
