Education Ministry’s 2025 notes to states flagged learning-jobs gaps

New Delhi: The recent youth-led protests may have centred around the 2026 NEET-UG question paper leak but they have much to do with deeper problems ailing the country's education-employment sphere, which were red-flagged by the Union education ministry itself in its most recent reports.

INDIA's YOUNG

Around 73% of the working age persons (15-64 years) in India have only "up to basic education", the employability rate among youngsters is stuck at 54.8% even as Indian IT and engineering companies are reporting a near 63% "talent shortage", as per the education ministry data shared at the 5th National Conference of Chief Secretaries, held in November 2025.

The most worrying metric shared by the ministry was on how three quarters of workers have basic to less than basic education levels with 26.6% at "less than basic" while 47.7% only have basic education.


Just 11. 9% of the employees come with "intermediate" educational levels while about 13.8% have "advanced" educational levels.

In contrast, even Brazil, which is a developing economy like India, counts only 8% of its working population at less than basic levels and 18.4% at basic levels of education. A healthy 47.5% of its employed persons have an intermediate level of education while 25.2% are at an advanced level, the education ministry presentation at the conference chaired by the PM said.

In developed economies, US has 51% employees at advanced educational levels and 45.5% at intermediate levels while Russia has 60.5% at intermediate educational levels and 35.5% at advanced levels, the presentations showed.

WORK SPREAD

The level of education factor is also reflected in the overall spread of India's workforce, as per the education ministry's data which showed that while 15 crore workers joined the workforce between 2017-18 and 2023-24, around 40% of these are self-employed, 37.3% are helpers in household enterprises and only 18% are salaried while 4% are casual labour.

Sectorally, it is still agriculture that absorbs the maximum workforce at 46% workers followed by trade/hotels at 14.6%, construction industry at 13.3%, 10% in manufacturing and services, and 5.3% in transport, storage and construction.

Even here, nearly 76% of those in agriculture and construction are educated only up to primary/middle school levels. The figure is 44% in trade/hotels/restaurants. Just 4.8% persons in the 15-29 age group have any formal skilling.

IT STARTS AT SCHOOL

Going bottom up, the ministry noted how years of schooling are a clear pointer to a country's overall productivity and India with 13.37 years of schooling is stuck at a Labour Productivity (in $GDP per hour worked) of 10.68.