Policy Update
Sairaj Patil
Background
Prior to the launch of the Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH), India’s skilling ecosystem suffered from significant fragmentation. Training, assessment, certification, and job-matching services were spread across separate schemes and portals, including the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS), the National Apprenticeship Training Scheme (NATS), and the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY), leaving candidates, training providers, and employers without a single, unified point of access. The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) launched SIDH on 13 September 2023 to address this fragmentation, building it as a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) rather than another standalone scheme.
Four objectives anchor its design: bringing training, assessment, and certification onto one platform; giving candidates, training providers, and assessment agencies end-to-end digital access; enabling course discovery, enrolment, and certification without paperwork; and making credentials digitally verifiable and portable. Mobile-first and Aadhaar-linked, SIDH sits alongside India’s other major digital public infrastructure efforts, aiming for one citizen-centric interface across the country’s skilling landscape.
Functioning
SIDH connects four groups on a single platform, candidates, training providers, assessment agencies, and employers, replacing what used to be separate registration and verification processes for each. A few elements define how it works:
- Unified Onboarding: Once providers, agencies, and employers register, candidates can discover courses, enroll, get assessed, and receive certification without bouncing between scheme-specific portals.
- Industry and Ed-Tech Partnerships: Course content draws on Sector Skill Councils and industry partners such as BCG, Cisco, Coca-Cola, HCL Technologies, Microsoft, NSDC, and Tech Mahindra, alongside ed-tech players like IGNOU and upGrad, keeping training tied to what industry actually needs.
- Verifiable Digital Credentials: Certificates carry recognition from the National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET) and are digitally verifiable and portable, cutting reliance on paper credentials that are harder to authenticate.
- Interoperability: The platform links to the National Career Service (NCS), eShram, DigiLocker, and BHASHINI (the National Language Translation Mission), extending its reach into job discovery, gig and unorganised workers, and non-English-speaking users.
- Public Dashboards: Enrolment, training, assessment, and certification data are tracked digitally and published as scheme-wise dashboards, a transparency layer most predecessor schemes lacked.
- SOAR: Launched in July 2025, Skilling for AI Readiness (SOAR) delivers self-paced, NSQF-aligned AI training through SIDH. Phase-II expanded this to 50 courses, including 35 credit-linked micro-credentials, a sign SIDH is becoming an active training channel, not just a directory.
- Mobile-First, Aadhaar-Linked Access: Built for phones, with Aadhaar-based identity verification meant to ease onboarding across both urban and rural candidates.
Further details are available in official MSDE releases on SIDH (Press Information Bureau, 2026).
Performance
SIDH’s growth since launch has been fast. As per the Press Information Bureau (2 February 2026), the platform has onboarded over 7,000 training providers, more than 70 assessment agencies, over 68,000 employers and industry partners, and more than 1.5 crore candidates, up sharply from around 88 lakh candidates registered as of June 2024, per an earlier written reply in the Rajya Sabha by the Minister of State (Independent Charge), Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE).
A closer look at PMKVY 4.0’s AI-training component shows where the numbers thin out. As per SIDH data up to 30 June 2026, 53,449 candidates enrolled in AI-related job roles; 39,104 were trained or oriented; 28,345 were assessed; 25,466 were certified.
Data sourced from Press Information Bureau, Rajya Sabha written reply on SIDH transparency measures and AI skilling initiatives, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India, 2026.
That’s roughly a 48% completion rate from enrolment to certification. While no scheme-specific study has examined this drop-off within SIDH’s AI courses, broader research on India’s short-term skilling programmes offers reasonable explanations. A Lok Sabha Standing Committee review of PMKVY, from December 2022, found similar dropouts linked to things like distance to training centres, infrastructure gaps, and weak alignment between course content and local job markets. Industry analysis on PMKVY 4.0 has similarly pointed to seasonal employment and migration, candidates leaving mid-course for immediate work opportunities in agriculture or construction, as a recurring driver of dropout across government skilling schemes generally. Whether similar dynamics apply to SIDH’s AI-specific funnel is worth dedicated study as SIDH scales SOAR further.
SIDH’s consolidated dashboards also reveal sharp state-wise disparities in scheme uptake. As per data shared in a Lok Sabha written reply on 27 July 2026, Maharashtra recorded the highest NAPS enrolment at 13.46 lakh apprentices, followed by Gujarat (5.66 lakh) and Tamil Nadu (5.41 lakh), while several smaller States and Union Territories,with including Lakshadweep (59) and Sikkim (2,249) — show enrolment figures several orders of magnitude lower.
Data sourced from Press Information Bureau releases, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India (2 February 2026; 29 July 2026; 27 July 2026).
Impact
Since its launch, SIDH has begun reshaping how skilling is delivered, tracked, and trusted across India’s fragmented training ecosystem. Its impact can be seen across four dimensions: how institutions coordinate skilling delivery, how credentials are trusted, how inclusively the platform reaches underserved workers, and how visibly its effects show up at the local level.
- Institutional Impact: By integrating with DigiLocker, eShram, the National Career Service (NCS), UIDAI, and the Public Financial Management System (PFMS), SIDH has moved skilling delivery from siloed, scheme-specific portals toward a single, secure, and verifiable digital backbone, enabling seamless monitoring and implementation across Central Ministries and State Governments.
- Transparency and Credibility: The issuance of digitally verifiable credentials and secure digital records has strengthened trust in certification, replacing paper-based certificates that were harder to authenticate, a meaningful shift for both employers assessing candidates and government agencies tracking scheme delivery.
- Labour Market Inclusion: Though no separate priority category exists for gig and platform workers, SIDH’s integration with the eShram portal, India’s national database of unorganised workers, enables targeted outreach to this segment, allowing gig workers to access NSQF-aligned skilling opportunities and maintain digital, portable records of their certifications.
- Localized Reach: SIDH-linked schemes have shown measurable delivery even at the constituency level. For instance, in Chatra Parliamentary Constituency, Jharkhand, 1,590 candidates were trained and 1,327 certified under PMKVY 4.0, alongside 16,180 ITI trainees enrolled over five years, illustrating that SIDH’s digital integration is translating into on-the-ground skilling activity beyond national aggregate figures.
Emerging Issues
While SIDH represents a genuine institutional advance in India’s skilling architecture, its rapid scale-up has outpaced the mechanisms needed to verify whether that scale is translating into real outcomes. The issues below fall into three broad clusters: a lack of independent scrutiny over the platform’s own reported figures, gaps in who the platform effectively reaches, and structural barriers, regional, digital, and data-related, that limit how evenly its benefits are distributed.
- No Independent Third-Party Evaluation: Unlike the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS), which has been evaluated by the Arun Jaitley National Institute of Financial Management (AJNIFM), SIDH’s reported figures, 1.5 crore candidates, 68,000+ employers, currently rest entirely on the Ministry’s own dashboards, with no independent audit yet available to verify actual training quality or employment outcomes.
- Enrolment-to-Certification Drop-off: Under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) 4.0’s AI-focused training component, only 25,466 of 53,449 enrolled candidates were certified as of 30 June 2026, a completion rate of roughly 48%, indicating that SIDH’s scale in onboarding does not yet translate proportionately into completed, verified outcomes.
- No Dedicated Provision for Gig Workers: Despite SIDH’s integration with the eShram portal, the Government has confirmed that no separate or exclusive priority category exists for gig and platform workers, who are covered only under existing scheme guidelines, raising the question of whether outreach through eShram is translating into meaningfully tailored skilling pathways for this growing workforce segment.
- Sharp Regional Disparities: SIDH’s own state-wise data reveals stark regional concentration. Maharashtra’s NAPS enrolment alone (13.46 lakh) is over 200 times that of Lakshadweep (59), with several North-Eastern and smaller UTs consistently trailing across nearly every SIDH-integrated scheme, indicating that platform-level integration has not yet translated into balanced regional outreach.
- Digital and Aadhaar Dependency: As a mobile-first platform linked to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for identity verification, SIDH’s design may still pose access barriers for candidates in low-connectivity regions or those without seamless Aadhaar-linked verification, a concern not yet addressed in available public data.
- Data Aggregation Without Outcome Depth: While SIDH dashboards report enrolment and certification numbers across schemes, granular funnel-level data (enrolled to trained to assessed to certified) is available only for select initiatives like PMKVY 4.0’s AI courses under the National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF), limiting the ability to assess completion and outcome quality across the wider ecosystem.
Way Forward
SIDH has strong potential to serve as the backbone of India’s skilling ecosystem, but realizing this fully will require closing the gap between scale and verified outcomes. An independent third-party evaluation, similar to AJNIFM’s assessment of NAPS, would help validate whether onboarding numbers are translating into genuine employability gains, rather than relying solely on the Ministry’s own dashboards. Strengthening funnel-level tracking (enrolment through certification) across all schemes, not just PMKVY 4.0’s AI courses, would also help identify where drop-off is occurring and target interventions accordingly.
Deeper, more visible integration with eShram for gig and platform workers, potentially through dedicated outreach rather than generic scheme coverage, would ensure this fast-growing workforce segment benefits meaningfully from SIDH’s infrastructure. Continued investment in low-connectivity and Aadhaar-verification alternatives would help extend SIDH’s reach to candidates currently underserved by its mobile-first design. Finally, building on campaigns like “Badhna Hai Toh Yahan Judna Hai,” sustained outreach paired with transparent, publicly disaggregated outcome data, beyond enrollment counts, will be key to establishing SIDH as a credible, unified digital public infrastructure for skilling.
Selected References and Important Links
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 Madhuritha D and Vyomini Nathwani for their invaluable guidance and support.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the organisation.
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