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India ranks 13th in World Future Skills Index
India ranks 13th in the QS World Future Skills Index 2027, excelling in AI readiness but facing skills alignment challenges that hinder talent development.
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New Delhi: India is ranked 13th in the QS World Future Skills Index 2027 released Tuesday, with the London-based higher education analyst saying the country has achieved “exceptional system scale” and is best placed among lower-middle-income economies to accelerate AI-led growth, but warning that it scores “poorly on skills alignment and quality consistency”, potentially limiting its ability to translate demographic and economic strengths into a “future-ready talent” pipeline.
QS said India’s overall score of 89.4 out of 100 placed it among the world’s stronger performers on AI-economy readiness and that the country possesses the ingredients to become one of the fastest-growing economies over the next decade. However, it noted that the country’s “relative weak spot” remains skills alignment, pointing to a mismatch between labour-market transformation and the ability of institutions to produce AI-, digital- and so-called green- talent at scale.
According to QS, the report is based on the index prepared on the readiness of 89 countries to harness the economic opportunities created by AI through a talent-supply and talent-demand analysis that combines QS’s proprietary data on higher education performance, skills gaps, and AI transformation with internationally-recognised third-party indexes.
The index is built around four equally weighted indicators, split between talent supply and talent demand. The talent supply side comprises “Skills Alignment”, which assesses how well graduates’ skills match employer expectations, and “Academic Readiness”, which measures the depth, quality and future-skills orientation of a country’s higher education system. On the talent demand side,”Future of Work” gauges how prepared a country’s labour market is for AI, digital and green transformation, while “Economic Transformation” evaluates the extent to which economic conditions can convert skills into productivity, innovation and growth. Each of the four indicators is further divided into 11 sub-indicators.
According to the report, India ranked fifth globally on the “Future of Work” indicator and 14th on “Economic Transformation”, but lagged on “Skills Alignment” where it stood 18th , suggesting that labour-market changes are outpacing the ability of institutions to produce graduates with AI, digital and green skills at scale. It ranked 22nd on the “Academic Readiness” parameter.
Nunzio Quacquarelli, president of QS, said India’s large digital workforce and demographic scale give it the potential to become the world’s fastest-growing economy over the next decade, but raising the median quality of talent remains a critical challenge.
“Our research suggests that a critical challenge is now raising the median quality of talent that its institutions produce, as well as addressing capacity hurdles,” he said.
India was placed 25th in the pilot edition released in 2025. However, QS said comparisons with the earlier ranking would be misleading because the methodology has been substantially revised.
“The last release of the index was a pilot edition. Since then, the methodology has been substantially refined and expanded, including the introduction of new sub-indices. As a result, year-on-year comparisons would not be meaningful,” Simona Bizzozero, communications director at QS, told HT.
“The elite tier of institutions -- IITs, IIMs and AIIMS -- are globally competitive, but the majority of Indian institutions produce graduates at volume with far lower employability rates,” the report said, adding that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is “structurally sound” but its implementation remains uneven across states and institution types.
The report also pointed to what it described as a “central paradox” for India -- producing the world’s largest outbound flow of international students while struggling to employ many graduates domestically. It argued that transnational education partnerships and international collaborations would be necessary to expand the supply of future-ready talent.
Among South Asian countries included in the index, India topped the region. The US topped the global rankings followed by Australia and the UK.
