By Aditya Raj
Most vocational training programmes in India begin by designing a curriculum. Learnet Skills Limited begins by calling employers.
This sequence reversal is not a minor operational difference. It is the founding logic of a programme that has trained 2.9 million young people across India since 2006, placed them in manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare, retail, and banking, and tracked their employment status for a year after placement. The difference between training people for jobs that exist and training people for jobs that might exist is the difference between the programme Learnet runs and the ones it was built to replace.
“We start with the jobs,” says RCM Reddy, Managing Director and CEO of Schoolnet India Limited, which operates Learnet as a joint venture with the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC). “Identify them, then go to the community and tell them what is available and what it pays.”
The supply-side logic that Learnet exploits is straightforward. Around sixty per cent of Indian students leave school before Class 12. The working-age population that results is large, young, and predominantly educated to Class 10 or below. On the demand side, most of India’s employment-intensive manufacturing industries do not require more than 12 years of formal education. A workforce looking for work and industries looking for workers meet at the same educational level. They simply have not been connected efficiently.
Learnet was designed to close that gap, sector by sector. The programme maps job availability in a target sector and geography: how many vacancies, in what roles, at what wage. It then enters communities and presents that information directly, as specific, verifiable employment data rather than a general promise of better prospects. Then it builds training centres that replicate the physical environment of the target workplace.
“We start with the jobs. Identify them, then go to the community and tell them what is available and what it pays.”
The replication is detailed. Reddy describes what it means in the garment sector, where trainees are predominantly young women. A worker whose hands carry scratches will mark white stitching on the fabric, and the garment gets rejected. So training addresses fabric hygiene and physical discipline alongside machine operation. “Even the basics: how to tie your garment, how to stand, how to present yourself at work,” Reddy says. These are the reasons a trained worker passes or fails the first week on a production floor.
The curriculum divides two-thirds technical content and one-third soft skills, covering financial literacy, personal health, communication, and professional conduct. Assessment is conducted by an independent body in each sector, not by Learnet. Certification follows. Then placement. Then a year of post-placement tracking to verify employment holds.
The model was built in 2006 in the textile and leather industries, sectors chosen for their scale, their employment intensity, and their compatibility with a workforce that has limited formal schooling. The Okhla institute in Delhi, where young people from surrounding low-income communities come for training, has by now produced graduates working in other countries.
The programme draws on the earlier part of Reddy’s career in ways that are not immediately obvious. His years at the Ministry of Textiles gave him a structural understanding of how India’s largest manufacturing sectors absorb labour, and where the friction between available workers and available jobs actually sits. His cluster development work with UNIDO added a methodology for connecting industrial organisations to community livelihood. Learnet was built with that specific knowledge working through it, not around it.
Beyond the skills programme, Reddy serves as India Chapter Lead of the Global Learning Council, a nonprofit that runs an annual school innovation competition drawing participation from thousands of schools. The top ten teams come to Delhi each December, to the Habitat Centre, to present their work. The winning team travels to the ILAS Institute in Switzerland. “We train the teachers too,” Reddy says, “so they can integrate the tools into their day-to-day. It is a nonprofit model. We contribute, not extract.”
As India’s premium partner for Google for Education, Schoolnet’s advisory relationship with the technology sector operates at the level of implementation, not just endorsement. The organisation deploys Chromebooks, teacher development programmes, and digital content across government and private schools. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that infrastructure enabled remote learning at a scale that would not otherwise have been available.
The larger vision Reddy articulates for Indian education over the next decade comes back to a specific disparity he has observed across his entire career. “The divide in terms of learning levels has been growing,” he says. “You have schools and systems that have access to high-quality digital, and you also have people who don’t.”
His response to that divide is logistical rather than aspirational. “You have to universalise access to technology the way you universalise access to drinking water. Every school in India, irrespective of location, should have reliable internet, digital infrastructure, high-quality content, and trained teachers.” The goal is not technology for its own sake. It is technology as an instrument in the hands of a teacher who knows how to use it.“Our motive is that every school in India should be empowered to use technology in an appropriate, responsible manner, so that teachers and students, and eventually the community, get benefited,” Reddy says. The sixty per cent who leave school before Class 12 are not a failure of ambition. They are an outcome of a system that has not yet connected the education it offers to the employment it produces. That connection is what Learnet was built to make.
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