India’s current higher education system is a bottleneck, as 1 million people join the labour force every month for the next twenty years without adequate training. 80% of India’s higher education system of 2030 is yet to be built and needs breaking the difficult trinity of cost, quality and scale. It needs massive innovation, investment, deregulation and competition.

TeamLease has hired somebody every 5 minutes for the last 5 years but hired only 5% of the kids who came to us for a job.

This report is part of our annual series to raise awareness on the unintended and dangerous consequences of our current labour and human capital regime.

This report is our second ranking of Indian States – the first one was done in 2006 - based on a labour ecosystem index, crafted to reflect the three variables of labour supply, labour demand and labour laws. Just like politics, all labour markets are local.

This report makes the case that India's next wave of poverty reduction will come from accelerating India's four labour market transitions; farm to non-farm, rural to urban, unorganized to organized and subsistence self-employment to decent wage employment.

This report attempts to unravel the issue of employability in its overall hues and colours. Employability of an individual is seen to depend on the knowledge and skills possessed; the attitude towards employment, and the economic context within which employment is availed. These are inter-linked factors and an effort has been made to substantiate the argument using empirical analysis throughout the report.

India’s economic reforms are on track and she has a new appointment to meet a heavily delayed “tryst with destiny”. However, there is justifiable disappointment with the lack of new job creation or shift from unorganized employment since reforms began in 1991.