As India's economy grows, cities expand and new industries arise, officials and policy analysts are grappling with a key question: Will Indians have the skills to build the new India?
By 2022, India will be short of more than 103 million skilled workers in the infrastructure sector, about 35 million in the automobile industry and 33 million in construction. By contrast, there is expected to be a shortage of only 5 million in the technology sector.
But as higher education has rapidly extended into towns and villages across the massive nation — college enrollment tripled between 1991 and 2011 — so have student aspirations to pursue the white-collar professions widely viewed as the most respectable: medicine, teaching, business management, and software and electronics engineering.