Internship, apprenticeship and skilling schemes face a reality check

PMIS, ELI and NAPS show promise but face low uptake, funding gaps and weak industry linkages, raising concerns over scale and job outcomes

Solapur-based Yash Padwalkar joined Tech Mahindra in December 2024 as part of the first batch of the Prime Minister Internship Scheme (PMIS). Now placed as a software engineer in the same company, he describes his experience as “exceptional”, saying it provided him both training and support. 

“As a fresh graduate, I did not have any job offers. But after eight months of internship the first job offer I received was from Indian Space Research Organisation,” Padwalkar said. 

Padwalkar is an example of the potential the programme, launched in October 2024, holds for youngsters in acquiring skills and — if they are lucky — getting a job. The fact remains, however, that the BTech graduate is one of the very few who have been able to access the scheme and make full use of it. 

The experience of prospective skilled young workers has been patchy in the three schemes the government has rolled out to promote skilling and employment — employment-linked incentive, or ELI, which is meant to narrow the skills gap in labour-intensive industries, PMIS, and the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme, or NAPS. 

PMIS shows potential but the scheme has not been able to scale up in the way it had targeted, experts said. Case in point: Soon after the PMIS was announced in the FY2025 Budget the government realised that it needed to test the waters before rolling out the full-fledged scheme. Hence, it launched a pilot. And this pilot is still underway. 

In the same FY25 Budget, drawing lessons from the results of a closely contested general election, the government also unveiled the ELI scheme to narrow the skill mismatch between labour supply and industry demand. The scheme came into effect on 1 August 2025 as the PM Viksit Bharat Rozgar Yojana with an aim to incentivise creation of more than 35 million jobs between August 1, 2025 and July 31, 2027. 

The ELI scheme’s first ever allocation, however, was announced in the Budget of FY 2026-27. Of the ₹99,446 crore earmarked for over a period of two years, the scheme received  only ₹20,083 crore in the 2026-27 Budget. 

Internships 

If Budget allocations are any yardstick, the PMIS numbers don’t tell a great story either. Even after running two rounds, the scheme has not been able to utilise ₹840 crore allocated for the pilot. As of December 31, 2025, only ₹64.91 crore had been utilised in FY2026. In Budget FY27, PMIS saw an allocation of ₹4,800 crore, less than half the FY26 allocation of over ₹10,000 crore.  The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), which runs PMIS, has identified some of the issues behind the lower acceptance of the scheme from the viewpoint of the applicants. The ministry has drafted a proposal to run the scheme’s pilot with tweaked norms in terms of the age criteria or and the duration of the scheme. 

Vinod Jhade, who has a BTech in computer science, said that the role he performed as a PMIS intern in Pune was within a highly domain-specific team working on information cybersecurity. “I have gained specialised experience, but not for long enough to qualify for roles in that field,” Jhade said. Typically, entry-level jobs in cybersecurity demand three years of experience, whereas the full duration of an internship is for a year. 

Jhade said there was a lack of clarity regarding his job status towards the end of the internship. Jhade has since joined a tech solutions consultancy as a customer representative (chat processing), earning ₹25,000 per month. 

As of January 27, a total of 3,417 interns in the first round had completed the PMIS course. However, 7,094 candidates left without completing their internships, the government told Parliament. 

In the monsoon session last year, the Standing Committee on Finance in its report submitted to Parliament said PMIS needs periodic independent evaluation for transparency and relaxed eligibility norms to attract more candidates from marginalised and

economically weaker sections. 

Without adequate support for living expenses, it said, candidates from remote or underserved regions may be unable to participate, which would impact the programme’s inclusivity and potential to attract a diverse pool of talent. 

Apprenticeship scheme 

There is the example of the Apprenticeship scheme too, currently in its second phase. It runs for a minimum duration of six months — half of PMIS’s — and can go up to two years or more. This scheme has its own set of issues. 

A recent NITI Aayog report has proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the apprenticeship ecosystem, urging deeper industry participation, streamlined governance and stronger support for apprentices. “Weak industry-academia linkages, inadequate institutional coordination, and fragmented regulatory frameworks continue to constrain the scalability and effectiveness of apprenticeship initiatives,” it said. 

The government partly supports the stipend apprenticeship scheme, limited to 25 per cent of the minimum prescribed stipend, subject to a maximum of Rs 1,500 per apprentice per month. 

“Apprentices are hired for longer periods than interns, but the applicants care about whether the role is prestigious, whether they will get absorbed as an employee and if the money offered is enough for survival,” Bornali Bhandari, a professor at National Council of Applied Economic Research. 

Highlighting an issue with wages, Bhandari said that an apprentice could turn up prepared with skills but companies will want to pay only ₹15,000 as starting salaries. 

The quality of the training being provided, too, has been flagged. 

“Technology is changing every three years, even faster actually. The syllabus which is adopted in such programmes is not updated adequately with the kind of technology, skills, application, machines, equipment which are used in the factories or at the employer’s end,” Abhay Tilak, director and secretary at the Indian School of Political Economy said. 

NAPS 2.0, the apprenticeship scheme, had a target to enrol 4.6 million apprentices over a period of four years from FY 2022-23 to FY 2025-26. Data showed that 2.4 million apprentices were enrolled from 2022-23 to December 31, 2024. As per the NAPS dashboard, 4.9 million people have been engaged, but only 721,496 have been given certificates upon completing their training. 

“This trend suggests that a substantial proportion of trainees either do not complete their training or are unable to convert their training into gainful employment and also highlights the importance of understanding what’s holding people back, so we can help make skilling programs more effective and truly impactful for those who need them,” said Binaifer Jehani, business

head — assessments, Crisil Intelligence. 

She suggested that such initiatives need to be demand-driven and made with stronger involvement of industry in curriculum design and delivery. 

Achieving scale  PMIS aims to provide internships to 10 million young people over the next five years, placed in companies that spend the most on corporate-social responsibility.  Policy experts feel that for a scheme such as this to achieve scale, it needs to look not just at the top 500 companies but a much larger universe of micro small and medium enterprises. 

“Seventy per cent of the manufacturing sector growth in the last three years has happened in the rural areas. These are small units, many doing sub contractual work but they also need skill support. The schemes need to align themselves with the demands of such enterprises too,” said Amitabh Kundu, distinguished fellow at the Research and Information System for

Developing Countries, a thinktank on the global south. 

While PMIS allows companies to collaborate with their supply chain firms to recruit interns, the government is considering widening the scope of firms taking part in the scheme. Professional services such as chartered accountants too have shown interest in accepting interns in roles such as book-keeping. 

“Largely the schemes are geared towards large companies and the scale needs to be widened beyond just that. There are structural norms and issues that need to be worked on. It might be better to first create examples of excellence and then

show other institutes what is possible,” said Mekin Maheshwari, founder and CEO of Udhyam Learning Foundation. 

Besides developing the technical skills, experts feel there is also a need to focus on soft skills which could have a large bearing on the outcome of such programmes.  “The ability to work as a team, communication, interpersonal relationships, the ability to handle diverse jobs, ability of multitasking – these are all supportive skills, which need to be a part of such training programmes,” Tilak added.  While Yash Padwalkar’s story captures the potential of industry exposure that some of the government programmes provide, for it to be replicated at scale, schemes like PMIS, ELI and NAPS could start by fixing wage gaps, widening participation beyond large firms and matching training with technology shifts.