Policy Update
Sairaj Patil
Background
The Government of India approved the Skill Acquisition and Knowledge Awareness for Livelihood Promotion (SANKALP) scheme through the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) in October 2017 and launched it on 19 January 2018. Implemented by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) with loan assistance from the World Bank, SANKALP forms part of India’s broader Skill India Mission, alongside flagship schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS), and the National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF).
While these other schemes focus on direct skills training, apprenticeship engagement, or standardizing qualifications respectively, SANKALP was designed to address a different, structural gap: the absence of a strong institutional architecture connecting skill development efforts at the Central, State, and District levels, essentially the administrative backbone that other schemes rely on to function effectively at the ground level.
The scheme had a total outlay reported as ₹4,455 crore, comprising a World Bank loan of ₹3,300 crore, along with State and industry leverage of ₹660 crore and ₹495 crore respectively (PIB, 2017). It was structured around three Result Areas: Institutional Strengthening at the Central, State, and District levels; Quality Assurance of skill development programmes; and Inclusion of marginalised populations, including Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and persons with disabilities, in skill training. Notably, a more recent government retrospective (PIB, 2026) cites SANKALP’s overall project outlay as ₹1,650 crore, a figure that differs from the original approval amount; this discrepancy across government sources has not been independently reconciled and is worth noting for readers seeking precise financial figures.
Source: Press Information Bureau, “Cabinet approves SANKALP & STRIVE Schemes to boost Skill India Mission,” Government of India, 2017.
SANKALP concluded in March 2025 (PIB, 2026). Its progress had earlier come under formal scrutiny: a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audit found that only 44% of allocated funds were disbursed between 2017-18 and 2023-24, and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament, reviewing the CAG’s findings in February 2026, criticised the scheme for slow implementation, weak monitoring mechanisms, and insufficient preparatory groundwork before the project period began.
Functioning
SANKALP operated as an institution-building and quality-assurance programme rather than a direct skills-training scheme. It worked through the following key elements:
- Institutional Strengthening: SANKALP supported the establishment and capacity-building of District Skill Committees (DSCs) and State Skill Development Missions, aiming to bring skill planning closer to local labour market needs through mechanisms such as District Skill Development Plans (DSDPs).
- Mahatma Gandhi National Fellowship (MGNF): A two-year academic fellowship programme under SANKALP, MGNF built technical competency in the skill ecosystem among fellows who were attached to District Skill Committees, combining academic training with practical, on-ground administrative experience to strengthen district-level skill governance.
- Quality Assurance: The scheme supported systemic reforms aimed at improving the quality of short-term skill training, including strengthening monitoring frameworks and building a Labour Market Information System (LMIS) at the central level.
- Inclusion of Marginalised Groups: SANKALP placed specific emphasis on extending skilling opportunities to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, persons with disabilities, and other underserved populations, including targeted interventions such as Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) certification for workers in villages selected under the Pradhan Mantri Adarsh Gram Yojana (PMAGY).
- Convergence Across Schemes: SANKALP was designed to connect existing MSDE institutions, such as the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and the National Instructional Media Institute (NIMI), with flagship skilling schemes including PMKVY, Jan Shikshan Sansthan (JSS), and NAPS, aiming for better coordination rather than each scheme operating in isolation.
- Outcomes-Based Financing: Unlike most centrally-funded schemes, SANKALP’s World Bank loan component was disbursed against Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs), jointly agreed by MSDE and the World Bank, meaning funds were released based on achieving specific, measurable results rather than expenditure-based disbursement.
Further details can be found in official MSDE and Press Information Bureau releases on SANKALP.
Performance
SANKALP’s performance record showed a substantial gap between the scheme’s design and its actual implementation. As per PIB’s own June 2026 retrospective, several concrete outcomes were eventually delivered by the scheme’s conclusion in March 2025, but this sat alongside a documented record of financial underutilisation flagged by India’s independent audit institutions.
A Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audit found that only 44% of SANKALP’s allocated funds were disbursed between 2017-18 and 2023-24, indicating persistent underutilisation over the scheme’s original implementation period. On the World Bank loan component specifically, the Ministry had utilised only ₹850.71 crore of the funds made available, a gap the CAG attributed to a lack of institutional preparedness ahead of the project’s start rather than external factors.
Source: CAG audit findings as reviewed by the Public Accounts Committee, Parliament of India, February 2026.
Reviewing these findings in February 2026, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament, chaired by Congress leader K.C. Venugopal, criticised the scheme for slow and poorly planned implementation, citing weak monitoring mechanisms and insufficient preparatory groundwork before SANKALP’s commencement. The PAC specifically flagged the absence of a robust real-time monitoring system to track physical progress and address implementation bottlenecks as they arose.
A separate, independent World Bank Implementation Completion Report on SANKALP and PMKVY found that despite training activity under both schemes, there was little evidence to suggest that this training led to measurable employment or self-employment outcomes, a striking finding given that improved employability was one of SANKALP’s core objectives. The same report also noted that SANKALP and PMKVY operated with separate budgetary allocations despite overlapping objectives, and that underlying scheme data was inconsistent across different reporting platforms, complicating efforts to assess outcomes with confidence.
Data sourced from CAG audit findings as reviewed by the Public Accounts Committee (February 2026) and the World Bank Implementation Completion Report on SANKALP.
Impact
SANKALP’s impact can be assessed against its three official Result Areas, institutional strengthening, quality assurance, and inclusion, alongside what the scheme’s mixed record reveals about externally-financed governance reform more broadly.
- Institutional Strengthening: SANKALP’s clearest achievement lay here. District Skill Committees scaled up from 248 in 2019-20 to 776 in 2024-25, covering nearly the entire country, while District Skill Development Plans, crucial for hyperlocal skilling strategies, expanded from 223 to 746 districts over the same period (PIB, 2026). This represented a genuine structural shift from earlier top-down, centrally-designed skilling efforts toward a more demand-driven approach.
- Quality Assurance and Outcomes: Evidence here is more contested. The World Bank’s own Implementation Completion Report found little evidence that training under SANKALP and PMKVY broadly led to measurable employment or self-employment outcomes. Yet component-level data tells a more encouraging story in specific instances: the Accelerated Mission for Better Employment and Retention (AMBER) project certified 24,055 candidates and placed 18,192 of them by its completion in March 2025, alongside entrepreneurship outcomes including 21,602 enterprises established and over 20,575 wage employment opportunities created (PIB, 2026). This suggests that while SANKALP’s broad, ecosystem-wide employment impact remains hard to verify, certain targeted components did produce concrete, trackable placement outcomes.
- Inclusion and Global Reach: Beyond domestic institution-building, SANKALP also supported a Global Skill Gap Study spanning 16 countries, which facilitated the deployment of over 25,000 Indian candidates into international job markets, and developed six AR/VR-based Simulated E-Skill Labs for immersive training in trades such as solar technician and electronics mechanic (PIB, 2026).
- Taken together, these achievements sit alongside a more cautionary finding: only 44% of SANKALP’s funds were disbursed over its original implementation period, per the CAG audit, even as some individual components delivered measurable results by the scheme’s conclusion. This illustrates a persistent gap between institutional capacity-building and consistent, scheme-wide economic outcomes in large, externally-funded governance reforms.
Emerging Issues
SANKALP’s implementation record raises concerns that fall into three broad categories: financial and institutional preparedness, whether the scheme’s core objective of employment translation was actually achieved, and structural fragmentation within India’s broader skilling ecosystem.
Chronic Underutilisation of Funds: Only 44% of SANKALP’s allocated funds were disbursed between 2017-18 and 2023-24, and of the ₹1,606.15 crore disbursed under the first tranche of the World Bank loan, the Ministry had utilised just ₹850.71 crore as of December 2023. The CAG attributed this gap to “non-preparedness” within the Ministry ahead of the project’s commencement, a finding that raises questions about whether large, externally-financed schemes are launched with adequate institutional readiness.
Weak Monitoring Mechanisms: The Public Accounts Committee specifically flagged the absence of a robust central monitoring system to track SANKALP’s implementation progress across States, with members questioning how the Ministry could assess real-time bottlenecks without such a system in place. The PAC reportedly characterised the scheme’s implementation as “lackadaisical.”
Limited Evidence of Employment Outcomes: Beyond financial underutilisation, a more fundamental concern is whether SANKALP achieved its core objective at the ecosystem level. The World Bank’s own Implementation Completion Report found little evidence that training under SANKALP and PMKVY translated into measurable employment or self-employment outcomes, a finding consistent with broader research on India’s skilling ecosystem, including a separate World Bank (2015) study showing that only 32% of NSDC-certified workers remained employed one to two years after training (Choudhuri, 2021), a retention rate that raises questions about the durability of skilling outcomes even when initial placement or certification numbers appear strong.
This coexists uneasily with PIB’s own reported figures on AMBER placements, underscoring how component-level success and ecosystem-wide outcomes can diverge.
Fragmentation Between SANKALP and PMKVY: Despite overlapping objectives, SANKALP and PMKVY operated with separate budgetary allocations, and the World Bank ICR noted that underlying scheme data was inconsistent across different reporting platforms, undermining efforts to assess outcomes with confidence across India’s skilling architecture as a whole.
Data and Figure Verification Gaps: The primary CAG and PAC reports on SANKALP were not independently accessible in public digital archives at the time of writing, meaning current public understanding of the scheme’s implementation record relies on secondary reporting rather than the original government audit documents. Compounding this, government sources themselves report inconsistent figures for SANKALP’s total outlay, ₹4,455 crore per the original 2017 approval versus ₹1,650 crore per a 2026 PIB retrospective, a transparency gap that extends to basic financial reporting, not just implementation tracking.
Way Forward
Addressing SANKALP’s implementation gaps requires treating institutional readiness as a precondition for launching large, externally-financed schemes, not an afterthought. Before committing to future World Bank-assisted or similarly structured programmes, MSDE and other implementing ministries should build in mandatory preparatory phases, covering staffing, monitoring systems, and State-level coordination mechanisms, before disbursement begins, rather than discovering these gaps mid-implementation as the CAG audit found.
Strengthening real-time, centralised monitoring is equally critical. A robust dashboard tracking fund utilisation, physical progress, and District Skill Committee performance across States, similar in spirit to the transparency mechanisms now used by platforms like SIDH, would allow course correction well before a scheme’s implementation period nears its end. Closing the gap between training and employment outcomes will also require moving beyond enrolment and disbursement metrics to systematic, independent tracking of post-training employment and wage outcomes, addressing the same evidence gap the World Bank’s own completion report identified, a gap that persisted even as component-level successes like AMBER’s placement figures were separately reported.
Finally, greater convergence is needed between SANKALP-supported institutional infrastructure and schemes like PMKVY, rather than the current pattern of parallel budgetary tracks and inconsistent data systems. This would help ensure that the institutional capacity SANKALP built, District Skill Committees, the Skill India Portal, and the LMIS, continues to deliver value now that the scheme has concluded. Without such convergence, this capacity risks becoming a stranded institutional investment, disconnected from the very schemes it was meant to support. Future retrospectives and audits of schemes like SANKALP would also benefit from consistent, reconciled financial reporting across government sources, so that basic facts such as total outlay are not left in dispute even after a scheme’s conclusion.
Selected References and Important Links
- Press Information Bureau. (2017). Cabinet approves SANKALP & STRIVE schemes to boost Skill India Mission [Press release]. Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1505736®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (n.d.). Skill India’s SANKALP scheme to focus on district level skilling ecosystem through seamless convergence and coordination [Press release]. Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=192464®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (n.d.). Sankalp programme [Press release]. Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1743274
- World Bank. (2025). Implementation completion and results report: Skills Acquisition and Knowledge Awareness for Livelihood Promotion (SANKALP). https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099050625184542875/pdf/BOSIB-b43f0c1a-bf26-465a-8ba7-53e30b5ad672.pdf
- Public Accounts Committee, Parliament of India. (2026). Examination of CAG audit findings on the SANKALP scheme. As reported in secondary coverage of The Hindu, February 2026. (Primary CAG/PAC report not independently located in public digital archives at time of writing.)
- Choudhuri, P. (2021). India’s employment challenges and the demand for skills (NCAER Working Paper No. WP 121). National Council of Applied Economic Research.
- Press Information Bureau. (2026, June 13). Empowered youth, stronger nation: India’s vision for Viksit Bharat @ 2047 [Press release]. Government of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2272408&lang=1®=1
About the Contributor
Sairaj Patil is a research intern at the Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), pursuing a Master’s degree in Political Science. His research interests lie in public policy, skill development and employment, and governance, with a focus on analyzing government schemes and their socio-economic impact.
Acknowledgement
The author extends sincere gratitude to Divya N and Sneha Kohli for their invaluable guidance and support.
Disclaimer
All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization.
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