The decisions, taken at a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aim to skill India’s youth and expand access to elite engineering education as the country moves toward its 2047 development goals.
The National Scheme for ITI Upgradation and Skilling will revamp 1,000 government-run ITIs into “government-owned, industry-managed aspirational institutes” in a hub-and-spoke model. It also includes the setting up of five National Centres of Excellence for Skilling at key National Skill Training Institutes (NSTIs) in Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kanpur, and Ludhiana.
Aimed at bridging the long-standing gap between training and industry demand, the scheme is designed to skill 20 lakh youth over five years, focusing on high-growth sectors like electronics, automotive, and renewable energy.
The ₹60,000-crore outlay will be shared among the Centre (₹30,000 crore), states (₹20,000 crore), and industry (₹10,000 crore), with 50% of the central share co-financed equally by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. The plan introduces a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) model to ensure deeper industry involvement and outcome-driven implementation, marking a departure from earlier, less impactful schemes.
The initiative also promises to upgrade training infrastructure, especially in trainer education, by enabling pre-service and in-service training for 50,000 trainers. This is expected to address systemic challenges in course relevance, employability, and perception surrounding vocational education.
IIT expansion to add 6,500 seats
In a parallel push to strengthen India’s higher education infrastructure, the Cabinet also cleared funding for Phase-B construction of five new IITs—Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh), Palakkad (Kerala), Bhilai (Chhattisgarh), Jammu (Jammu & Kashmir), and Dharwad (Karnataka).
With a combined cost of ₹11,828.79 crore over four years (2025–26 to 2028–29), the expansion will increase the student intake from 7,111 to 13,687, a jump of 6,576 seats across undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD programs. An additional 130 faculty positions at the professor level will be created, alongside the development of five state-of-the-art research parks to foster stronger industry-academia linkages.
The move aligns with the Budget 2025–26 announcement, which noted that the total student strength across India’s 23 IITs has doubled from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh in the last decade. The five newer IITs—operational from their permanent campuses since 2015–17—will now receive their first significant infrastructure boost since inception.
