
India’s education system is like a Wi-Fi signal in a concrete bunker—plenty of theory, no connection to the real world.
When the Kasturirangan Committee unveiled the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, there was much applause—from think tanks, bureaucrats, and Parliament benches. It promised flexibility, multidisciplinary learning, and even music in engineering colleges. Mother tongue till Class 5, Sanskrit at leisure, and academic credits for ‘environmental awareness’. A bit of everything—for everyone.
But amidst this academic choreography, one question was never asked: What can the student actually do after graduating?
While Parliament debated heritage, history, and Hindi, India’s graduates kept asking: “Where’s the job?” The NEP, for all its vision, never opened the toolbox. It talked about learning outcomes—but forgot the learning output. And that is the gap that stares us down every time a degree-holder stands idle while a technician is nowhere to be found.
Let’s look around. We’re producing more educated youth than ever. And paradoxically, more confusion too. The more degrees we dish out, the fewer jobs seem to match them. Not because our students aren’t smart—but because, quite frankly, we’ve been teaching them what no one needs.
Even our top institutions are not spared. You’ll still find programmes like Metallurgical Engineering or Ocean Technology—worthy once, but now unable to keep up with industries that demand AI programmers, EV system designers, solar technicians, and data plumbers. Yes, data plumbers—the ones who clean and direct information flows in this messy digital economy.
Meanwhile, the great Indian education debate has taken a detour—into the land of languages. Should textbooks be in English or Tamil? Should children learn Hindi first or third? The courts are trying to decide. The students are just trying to understand the job listing in Bangalore.
On the ground, the disconnect is not academic—it’s real, brick and mortar.
Visit any new housing complex, and it’s all there. Switchboards behind doors. Bathrooms that flood sideways. Car parks that resemble chess puzzles. All signed off by engineers and architects with glowing credentials. But none seem to have been taught drainage slopes, power backups, or just basic spatial logic.
This isn’t a construction failure. It’s an education failure.
We train our best minds to crack entrance tests, not real-world problems. Civil engineers are preparing for UPSC, while plumbers are teaching themselves on YouTube. Hospitals are desperate for paramedics. Offices are hunting for someone who can connect the printer to Wi-Fi. But students are stuck trying to memorise difference between diode and triode—for the fifth semester in a row.
At the heart of the mess is a broken pipeline—the last-mile delivery of education. The system prints degrees like railway tickets, but without telling the passenger where the train is going.
Here’s where polytechnics and finishing schools must rise from the margins. We need polytechnics that produce mobile repairers, laptop troubleshooters, solar panel installers, and website builders for neighbourhood businesses. These are not fallback jobs. These are future jobs. And they deserve dignity, not derision.
Finishing schools too must look beyond body language and etiquette. Can the student solve a real problem? Write a work email? Handle a customer complaint? Run a basic CRM? These are not soft skills—they’re survival skills.
To be fair, the system isn’t entirely asleep. In the post-NEP glow, IITs like Delhi and BHU have announced long-overdue curriculum overhauls. They’re reducing credit loads, introducing flexible exits, mandatory internships, and even blending design thinking into core programs. The government too, through recent Cabinet decisions, has promised to boost skill centres and reorient technical education under a national skilling drive. These are welcome moves. But as with most reforms in India, they arrive dressed in policy language, while the labour market waits in work boots. Too little? Perhaps. Too late? Maybe. Whether it’s timely enough to matter—time will tell.