For Pratibha Kalita, a 45-year-old artisan from a small village in Assam, weaving was integral to life, but only as a household skill and a means to clothe her family. With hands-on training – from refining her techniques and expanding her product range to learning brand building and business management, she transformed this generational craft into a thriving enterprise.
Today, Pratibha is a successful entrepreneur who, having secured her family’s future, creates livelihood opportunities for other women while continuing to remain a proud custodian of her heritage. Her journey is a testament to how skilling is more than just a pipeline to employment – at its best, it is also a vehicle to unlock agency, dignity, and freedom. As the late APJ Abdul Kalam so powerfully put it, “Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect.”
Skilling in India is often viewed through a narrow, purely economic lens – a vocational training course, a certificate, a job placement. Traditional approaches to skilling may ask, “How many youth did we train? How many jobs did we create?” While important, these risk overlooking the soul of the matter. We need to understand what opportunities skilling unlocks for individuals.
Consider the scenario of handing someone a smartphone, but offering no network access, electricity to charge it, or digital literacy to understand and make use of its features. Nor is there freedom from social norms and cultural restrictions, especially those linked to gender. Merely owning a smartphone does not expand opportunities. True skilling, in this light, is not just about imparting quality resources and abilities, but also about ensuring that people can meaningfully use those abilities to shape their future. This underscores a simple truth: We must reimagine and expand our definition of skilling to be dignity-first and human-centred, which lends itself to greater confidence, resilience, income, and upward mobility.
{{/usCountry}}Consider the scenario of handing someone a smartphone, but offering no network access, electricity to charge it, or digital literacy to understand and make use of its features. Nor is there freedom from social norms and cultural restrictions, especially those linked to gender. Merely owning a smartphone does not expand opportunities. True skilling, in this light, is not just about imparting quality resources and abilities, but also about ensuring that people can meaningfully use those abilities to shape their future. This underscores a simple truth: We must reimagine and expand our definition of skilling to be dignity-first and human-centred, which lends itself to greater confidence, resilience, income, and upward mobility.
{{/usCountry}}The challenge is not just to train people, but to nurture diverse forms of value creation that exist across society today. How do we create skilling systems that not just teach, but listen, learn, and adapt? We should not only prepare individuals for roles within existing structures, but also enable them to create new ones. This can be driven by democratising institutions that inspire ideas and incubate talent and innovation to find solutions for societal challenges, but must also, notably, go beyond curriculum and the classroom to meet people where they are; through decentralised, community-based models that reflect local realities and the often invisible ecosystems that surround them.
With the informal sector forming a significant segment of India’s workforce, employing roughly over 90% of the workforce, such interventions are essential to catalyse real impact. When we invest in new tools and resources, digital platforms, and access to fair markets, while also embedding both technical and soft skills, including problem-solving and entrepreneurial thinking, across skilling programmes, we see transformation.
India’s youth are not waiting for permission to build. They simply require an ecosystem that recognises their drive and equips them with the skills to lead. Philanthropies have a unique, instrumental role to play in this equation. They can build enabling ecosystems, amplify grassroots voices, spearhead vital partnerships to scale technical, capacity building, or mentoring support, and invest in local innovation and sustainable models that may not promise instant scale, but have the potential to deliver deep, meaningful, enduring impact.
A handloom artisan turned business-owner developing contemporary designs and leveraging technology for scalability while carrying forward centuries of tradition; a sports coach mentoring underserved youth, instilling them with discipline, shaping community spirit, and improving school attendance and healthy lifestyle practices; an Asha worker encouraging behaviour change and strengthening rural healthcare delivery; a self-help group entrepreneur mobilising savings and livelihoods – they are what present day India needs. They are the fabric and face of a vibrant, skilled India, and indicators of what is possible when skilling is purpose-led and empowers and sparks ambition.
There are millions like Pratibha across India. We must build skilling ecosystems for them that go beyond the classroom — inspiring individuals to re-write their stories and shape their journey. Our task is twofold: To skill them, but also to see and nurture them.
Siddharth Sharma is CEO, Tata Trusts. The views expressed are personal.