SDG 8: Decent Work & Economic Growth | SDG 9: Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure
Institutions: NITI Aayog | Ministry of Education | Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology
NITI Aayog has unveiled two major strategy documents — Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy and Roadmap on AI for Inclusive Societal Development—that together outline India’s long-term vision to harness artificial intelligence (AI) for both economic transformation and social equity.
The Job Creation Roadmap, prepared with NASSCOM and BCG, estimates that India could generate up to 4 million new jobs by 2030 through AI-led growth in technology services, healthcare analytics, logistics, and digital agriculture. Yet it also cautions that routine service roles face automation risk unless India invests rapidly in AI literacy, reskilling, and talent retention.
To address this, the report proposes a coordinated National AI Talent Framework—a mission-style structure to unify AI education, certification, and workforce deployment across ministries, academia, and industry.
→Building AI Literacy from the Ground Up
NITI Aayog identifies AI literacy as the foundation of a future-ready workforce. It recommends embedding AI awareness, ethics, and problem-solving skills across India’s education continuum:
Schools: Introduce basic AI concepts and coding logic at the secondary level through NCERT curricula, linking them to real-life use cases in health, climate, and education.
Universities: Create interdisciplinary AI modules and micro-credentials, enabling students from all disciplines—engineering, economics, design, or social science—to gain AI familiarity under NEP 2020.
Vocational and skilling systems: Integrate AI competencies in ITIs, community colleges, and sector skill councils through PPPs with industry-led platforms like NASSCOM’s FutureSkills Prime.
This three-tier approach aims to democratise AI understanding, making it a universal cognitive skill, not a niche technical specialization.
→ Reskilling and Upskilling at Scale
To prevent workforce obsolescence, the roadmap calls for a national reskilling engine that updates existing professionals for AI-augmented tasks—ranging from data analytics and machine learning operations to prompt engineering and human-AI interface design. It recommends modular, stackable courses and industry-endorsed certifications that can be renewed over a worker’s lifetime, using both online and blended delivery.
→ Building India as a Global AI Talent Hub
A key pillar of NITI’s vision is to make India not just AI-literate, but a world supplier of AI talent. The roadmap emphasises that India’s demographic dividend—its young, English-proficient, STEM-heavy workforce—can become a strategic export advantage if supported by sustained investment in quality, research, and incentives to retain skilled professionals.
To achieve this, NITI proposes:
Establishing centres of excellence and AI innovation clusters linked with global research networks;
Facilitating academic–industry–startup exchange programmes to prevent brain drain;
Incentivising AI faculty development and PhD pipelines in Indian universities;
Building compute and data infrastructure under Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to anchor domestic innovation; and
Promoting “AI-for-Bharat” products—locally trained models that serve Indian languages and contexts—to showcase inclusive AI leadership internationally.
Together, these steps would position India as a trusted, human-centric AI hub in global value chains—mirroring how it once became a software and IT services powerhouse.
→A Parallel Roadmap for Inclusion
The companion Inclusive Societal Development Roadmap extends this vision to India’s informal workforce of 490 million people, proposing a persona-based design that tailors AI solutions to diverse livelihoods—from farmers and street vendors to gig and home-based workers. Its flagship proposal, the Digital ShramSetu Mission, envisions an AI-enabled platform integrating skilling, job matching, and social security in vernacular, accessible formats. The report emphasises trust, transparency, and usability, arguing that inclusive AI must amplify, not replace, human agency.
Together, the two roadmaps articulate a dual-track AI vision—growth through innovation and justice through inclusion. The emphasis on AI literacy as a foundational skill transforms technology policy into human-capital policy. By linking education reform, workforce development, and social protection, NITI redefines AI not merely as a digital sector but as a national capability-building project.
This framework also clarifies India’s comparative advantage: with the world’s largest young workforce, India can become a global AI talent hub if learning pathways are continuous and adaptive. Realising that potential will require close coordination between Digital India, Skill India, and NEP 2020, along with interoperable data standards and regional skilling centres.
What is Digital ShramSetu? → A proposed national mission to connect informal and gig workers to AI-enabled skilling, job-matching, and social-security platforms — integrating frontier technologies with welfare delivery to create a digitally inclusive labour ecosystem.
Follow the full reports here:
Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy – NITI Aayog (2025)
Roadmap on AI for Inclusive Societal Development – NITI Aayog (2025)
NITI Aayog Roadmap Charts AI Pathway for India’s Informal Workforce