NEW DELHI: Registrations on the labour ministry’s National Career Service (NCS) portal fell significantly in 2025-26 (FY26) across categories, according to data from the Ministry of Labour and Employment.
The NCS portal, the government’s digital platform connecting jobseekers and employers, receives registrations from jobseekers, employers, government departments, placement organisers, and skill providers, among others.
Data from the NCS portal showed that active registrations by skill providers fell by over 70 per cent from 920 in FY25 to 273 as on February 28, 2026, the lowest since FY17. Skill provider registrations had remained above 500 for the past six years before this decline.
Registrations of placement organisations saw the steepest fall, plunging 90.6 per cent from 181 in FY25 to just 17 in FY26. The number has declined sharply from 448 in FY23 and 390 in FY24.
Meanwhile, active registered employers fell 20.4 per cent from 1.8 million in FY25 to 1.4 million in FY26 as on February 28, 2026. Till FY25, the number of active registrations of PAN-verified employers had risen steadily each year before dropping to a three-year low in FY26.
Registrations of government departments also fell 20 per cent from 71 in FY25 to 57 in FY26. Active registrations had peaked at 269 in FY18 and had remained around or above 100 since then.
This decline comes even as the government has been pushing greater digitisation of labour market services and expanding the use of online portals for job matching and service delivery.
Active registrations of counsellors also fell from 183 in FY23 to 41 in FY24 and further to just nine in FY25. Data for FY26 was not available. At the same time, active jobseeker registrations fell by about 40 per cent from 14.6 million in FY25 to 8.7 million as on February 28, 2026.
“There are multiple parallel portals being run by different ministries, which can be confusing for users and may limit overall adoption. Many of these platforms offer similar services around job matching and skilling. Apart from NCS, there is also the Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH), which provides comparable functionalities, raising questions about why so many portals exist with overlapping use cases,” said Bornali Bhandari, professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).
The SIDH, launched in September 2023, is a platform run by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. It is designed as a digital interface for skilling, offering end-to-end services including course discovery, enrolment, certification, and job linkage, along with onboarding of training providers and employers.
Over the past decade, especially since the launch of the Digital India programme, the Centre has introduced a range of portals, with at least eight at the national level, covering jobs, skilling, informal workers, and apprenticeships. Platforms such as the National Career Service (NCS), e-Shram portal, and Skill India Digital are now being used as key tools to connect workers with opportunities, showing a clear shift towards digital systems. However, having multiple portals across ministries has led to overlap in data and a split user base, with usage varying widely across platforms.
A 2023 report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour, Textiles and Skill Development also flagged the need to integrate multiple government portals, noting efforts to interlink databases such as the e-Shram portal, National Career Service (NCS), Udyam portal, and ASEEM portal to improve coordination.
In its submission to the committee, the labour ministry said that NCS had already been integrated with the ASEEM portal in March 2022, while the e-Shram portal has been linked to NCS and indirectly to the Udyam portal. The ministry added that these platforms are being brought together under the Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH), with API integration already tested, which would allow workers to access skilling, training, and apprenticeship opportunities through a single interface once operational.
The Centre had also announced in the Union Budget 2022-23 speech that key platforms such as the Udyam portal, e-Shram portal, National Career Service (NCS), and ASEEM portal would be interlinked and expanded into “live, organic databases” to provide services ranging from credit and skilling to recruitment, with the aim of formalising the economy.
Source: Business Standard
