Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday proposed setting up a high-powered “Education to Employment and Entrepreneurship” standing committee to strengthen the link between education, employment and enterprise creation with special focus on the services sector.
Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at a press conference in New Delhi, India on Sunday. (Bloomberg)”The 21st century is technology-driven. Adopting technology is for the benefit of all people – farmers in the field, women in STEM, young people eager to acquire high skills and access new opportunities. The government has taken several steps to support new technologies through AI Mission, National Quantum Mission, National Research Fund,” and Researchman Research Fund, INHEAD, and Infoman said. Announcement of proposed committee.
The panel is expected to recommend steps to expand India’s footprint in the global services market, with the government targeting a 10% share of world services trade by 2047. It will identify service subsectors with the highest potential for growth, employment and exports and suggest ways to address sector-specific gaps limiting job creation.
According to the directive terms, the committee will examine cross-sector policy and regulatory issues, including standard-setting and accreditation, and explore areas where India can enhance services exports. A key part of its mandate will be to assess how emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), may impact jobs and skills requirements in the coming years.
To respond to these changes, the panel is expected to propose measures to introduce AI-related education in school curricula and strengthen teacher training institutes, including state education research and training councils. It will recommend upskilling and reskilling programs for technology professionals and engineers to keep pace with emerging technologies.
More Read
The committee can suggest AI-based processes to better match workers with job and training opportunities. It is tasked with proposing ways to make the informal work system more visible and verifiable with the aim of improving access to opportunities and upward mobility in the labor market. Also, it will consider measures to attract skilled members of the Indian diaspora and foreign professionals to work in India. The government says the overall objective is to better align the education and training system with industry needs and help create jobs and enterprises in the service economy.
Industry participants said the move reflects recognition of a widening gap between AI adoption and workforce readiness. “By formally assessing the impact of AI on jobs and skills—targeting a 10% global services market share by 2047—the government is acknowledging what the industry has known for months: the operational gap between AI ambitions and workforce readiness is now our primary obstacle,” said Dhruv Garg, partner at Policy & Business Advisory Indian Project Go AP (Policy & Business Advisory).
“The question is whether AI will reshape India’s service sector, but whether our policy processes can translate the committee’s recommendations into curricula and certifications quickly enough to match the pace at which AI is already reshaping its work,” Garg added.
More Read
The proposal comes as the government prepares to expand the India AI Mission, which was launched in 2024, to build a domestic AI ecosystem by developing foundational models, expanding access to computing infrastructure and funding startups and research institutes. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnab recently said that the next phase of the mission will be launched in the next five to six months. Startups selected under the mission are expected to launch major languages and minor models at the AI Summit this month, while the general compute stack will be expanded from the current 38,000 GPUs.
Ganesh Gopalan, co-founder and CEO of Gnani.ai said, “AI Mission 2.0 is expected to focus on world-class scaling systems. Access to government projects and public datasets will be critical to improving AI models and expanding them to real-world use cases,” he added.
Policy experts, however, caution that deep structural challenges remain. India’s R&D spending is below 0.7% of GDP, limiting the country’s ability to sustain frontier AI research, said Rohit Kumar, founder of The Quantum Hub. He added that universities and research institutes need greater autonomy and stronger private sector incentives to support long-term, high-risk research.
