By Dr. Gyan Pathak
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojna (DDU-GKY) will complete 12 years on September 25, 2026. It was launched by PM Narendra Modi led government with great fanfare on September 25, 2014 under the National Rural Livelihood Mission. The chief objective was to equip rural youth with relevant skills and access to employment. Nevertheless, it could train only 18.47 lakh youths and out of them only 12.43 lakhs could get placement, and many of them were not sustainable as regular employment, as the DDU-GKY 2.0 launched on April 1, 2025, has already recognized, under which actual training batches are scheduled to roll out starting October 2026.
How dismal is the performance so far can be understood with the comparative figures. Government figures suggest that the youth population is projected to reach nearly 345 million by 2036. Union government says that India’s young population presents a significant opportunity to strengthen economic growth and rural livelihoods, and also that harnessing this demographic potential requires greater access to quality skills, employment, and livelihood opportunities.
The DDU-GKY was launched by Union Ministry of Rural development purportedly after recognising this need. As the government is celebrating the 12 years of the scheme providing youth of 15-35 years, the dismal performance presents an occasion to critically examine the weaknesses of the programme, rather than giving headline figures in such a way that veils its dismal achievements.
Government has already notified the upgraded DDU-GKY 2.0 Guidelines in May 2025 and claimed continued focus on rural skilling by providing ₹750 crore allocation. However, the problems that the scheme is facing need special attention, otherwise the DDU-GKY 2.0 will also fail to achieve the desired level of performance.
Government must take into consideration that the central problem with DDU-GKY is not the absence of training, but it is the weak conversion of training into stable, adequately paid and locally viable livelihoods. The government’s own data and the recent parliamentary scrutiny point to a gap between the scheme’s formal design and the labour-market reality faced by rural youth.
The latest government backgrounder says that since 2014-15, 18.47 lakh rural youth have been trained and 12.43 lakh placed—roughly two-thirds of those trained. It means that about one-third of those trained do not show up in the reported placement outcome.
The first problem is therefore that the government measures a process much more successfully than it demonstrate a durable livelihood outcome. Here one should note that the DDU-GKY is explicitly a placement-linked programmes.
Government’s headline projection says the DDU-GKY 2.0 scheme is currently being implemented across 31 States and Union Territories through over 749 approved projects, with more than 760 active training centres and over 455 Project Implementing Agencies, covering all sectors of the economy as on date. Since inception over 18.47 lakh candidates have been trained for more than 800 job roles, and over 12.43 lakh have been placed. Complementing the skilling efforts, RSETIs promote self-employment and rural entrepreneurship. As of date, 647 RSETIs across 634 districts have trained 63.47 lakh candidates, with 45.60 lakh successfully settled.
However, one should note that placement is not the same thing as employment. A young person being placed in a job tells us little about whether that job lasts, pays enough, offers progression, or is economically worthwhile after migration and living costs. This distinction is important because the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development reported in August 2026 that, of roughly 18 lakh candidates trained, about 12 lakh had been placed, while inadequate post-placement salaries were contributing to high dropout rates and distress migration. Therefore, the important question is how many trainees remain in decent employment after 6, 12 and 24 months, and what is their real income after migration-related costs?
Another problem with the scheme is that it risks becoming a pipeline into low-wage migration. There is an inherent tension in DDU-GKY’s model. Rural youth are trained in villages but often have to migrate to distant towns or other states for employment. The original guidelines themselves acknowledge that migration can involve accommodation, food, isolation, adjustment to formal-sector work and risks of exploitation. A nominally successful placement can therefore be economically unsuccessful.
This suggests that the DDU-GKY has sometimes addressed the supply of labour more effectively than the creation of remunerative employment near the source of labour.
Moreover, training and job choice have historically been poorly matched. Evidence from a randomised evaluation conducted with DDU-GKY in Bihar and Jharkhand is particularly revealing. Researchers found that trainees often lacked sufficient information about the jobs being offered—including the job, employer, location and compensation. The overall information intervention did not significantly change placement quality, but the research nevertheless identified inadequate information about actual employment opportunities as an important problem in the training-to-job transition.
DDU-GKY is supposed to be demand-driven, but demand from an employer is not necessarily the same as demand from a young worker.
Hundreds of courses have been added to the scheme. However, industry alignment needs to mean more than adding new courses. The government now says DDU-GKY 2.0 will focus on industry-led training and emerging sectors such as EV maintenance, renewable energy, healthcare, logistics, care work, retail, hospitality and media. That is directionally significant, but adding sectors and job roles does not automatically create better employment. The scheme needs to answer the question like level of wages, training period, availability of jobs locally, the higher skills needed, and how to reduce the skill and job mismatch. We have seen that youths are trained for the skill for which there is no job in the market.
Both the government and the training agencies are interested in figures. They produce large number of trained people, but don’t care for the quality of skill, or if there are enough jobs available in the market for the skill they provide.
There is a deeper contradiction in the scheme because it tries to solve a structural employment problem through a skill programme. Rural youth unemployment and underemployment have many reasons, and lack of skill is only one of them, and minor one.
Parliamentary Standing Committee has probed rural skilling and migration together and its finding indicate that low wages and job dropouts can contribute to distress migration. The policy question is therefore – Has DDU-GKY increased the lifetime earning capacity of rural youth? Emphasis needs to be change now – and we should focus on number of youth gaining useful skills, number remaining employed, median earning after placement, one to 2 years retention in job, skill and job matching, net income after migration, career progression, and independent outcome verification and maintaining transparency. Better jobs, better wages, and longer career should be the yardstick, not the temporary placement by giving only financial assistance for a limited time period only to produce attractive figures to show. (IPA Service)
