This paper examines India’s education and skilling system within the context of the country’s employment eco-system. The first challenge is in comparing India with its 1.4 billion people and 36 States and Union Territories (UTs), with countries of different sizes and levels of per capita GDP. The second challenge is to find consistent and comparable data to evaluate the evolution of education and skills over time.

Much of literature focuses on the top end of regular, formal jobs, constituting roughly 10 percent of workers in India, but 58 percent of workers are “self-employed” – better described as “micro-entrepreneurs”, whose skilling needs and requirements, are seldom recognized in the employment literature.

This paper conceptually simplifies the employment ecosystem into a set of three pyramids:

1. Education, with layers of primary, secondary and tertiary education;
2. Skills, with un/low skilled, semi (medium) skilled and (highly) skilled labor; and
3. Jobs, with low/minimum wage, average wage, and high-wage employees.

The paper finds little or no correlation between minimum learning outcomes and per capita GDP.

Market connectivity and efficiency is poor at the middle levels of the three pyramids, and virtually absent at the bottom of the pyramids. By strengthening the middle of the skilling pyramid, we can make India the human capital supplier to the World: “Skill for India, Skill for the World.”