ABSTRACT
India is in a position to reap its prospective demographic dividends by 2020 by becoming one of the world's youngest countries with a median age of 27.3 and an estimated 28 percent contribution to the world's workforce. This chapter explores the scope and nature of the work-readiness challenges in India. It considers the strategic responses initiated by government, industry and educational stakeholders. In contrast to the prolonged economic downturn in most Western countries, India's economy has grown faster than its pool of skilled workers, posing an immense challenge to its long-term sustainability. The growth in the Indian education sector, buoyed by more than a 7 percent per annum growth of gross domestic product (GDP) in the last decade, has witnessed a deficient array of haphazard policies that lack strategic and systemic planning. The problem of work-readiness of graduates in India can also be attributed to the missing link between industry and higher education (HE).
