A Comptroller and Auditor General report has laid bare the Skill India fraud. The government’s flagship programme to train millions of young Indians for jobs collapsed under the weight of fake records, missing money, and training centres that never actually trained anyone.
An audit report tabled in Parliament last week exposed how officials spent Rs 10,194 crore over seven years while faking training records, using ghost bank accounts, and certifying people who never attended classes.
The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana started in July 2015 with a promise. The government said it would train 132 million young Indians and help them find jobs. By 2022, only 11 million people got certificates. Even fewer found work.
Bank Accounts That Don’t Exist
Auditors checked the programme’s computer records. They found something shocking. Out of every 100 people listed as trained, 94 had no real bank account details on file.
The records showed “11111111111” as bank account numbers. Some showed “123456”. Others had just names or random letters instead of numbers.
One bank account number appeared for 2,106 different people. Another account served 5,497 trainees. The same 12,122 account numbers were used again and again for more than 52,000 different people.
Every certified trainee was supposed to get Rs 500 sent directly to their bank account. The money never reached 34 lakh people because their account details were fake or missing.
The Ministry of Skill Development told auditors in May 2023 that they stopped making bank details mandatory because of “problems at ground level”. They said they would use Aadhaar numbers instead. But that didn’t work either.
Auditors tried to contact 4,330 certified trainees by email to check if they really took the training. More than one-third of the emails bounced back. Of those that reached, only 171 people responded. Most of those responses came from the same email address or from training centre staff, not actual students.
Training Centres With No Students
Audit teams visited 90 training centres across eight states. They found three centres in Bihar completely shut down. One centre in Odisha was closed.
In Banka district in Bihar, government records said training was happening on the day auditors showed up. State officials admitted those classes had actually ended six months earlier. Yet the Bihar Skill Development Mission paid Rs 5.72 lakh to another closed centre in Madhepura district after auditors reported it was shut.
Out of 86 working centres, 24 did not have the fingerprint machines needed to record student attendance. In some centres, the machines were broken. In others, they were never installed.
The audit team also talked to 1,045 students who were actually in class. Only one student said they learned about the programme from official awareness camps. Most heard about it from friends and family.
The Same Face in Different Places
One company called Neelima Moving Pictures claimed it trained 33,493 people in eight states for 21 different job types between January and November 2020. Auditors went looking for the company. It had vanished.
The Media and Entertainment Skill Council told auditors the company shut during COVID-19. But the photographs the company submitted told a different story. The same photos appeared in training records for different batches in different states.
One photo showed up as proof of training in Gaya district in Bihar. The exact same photo appeared in records from Bahraich and Shravasti in Uttar Pradesh, from Jalgaon in Maharashtra, and from Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan.
Another company, Radiate Designs, certified 15,218 people. The Registrar of Companies struck this company off its records in 2015. It had filed no returns since 2014. Auditors visited the address listed for the company. They found only a shop with no sign outside.
Present Media Private Limited certified 19,561 dancers, hairdressers, and makeup artists across nine states. Auditors discovered they used the same written testimonial for three different students. Only the photos changed. The company also submitted photos from other government schemes as proof of their own training.
Jaipur Cultural Society claimed it trained 56,203 people in media. The society submitted newspaper clippings as proof. Auditors spotted something odd. Someone had erased the dates and locations in the clippings and written in different dates and places. One clipping showed February 31, 2020 as the event date.
Children, Barely Literate Get Technical Certificates
The programme had clear rules. Trainees had to meet minimum age and education requirements for each skill. Auditors found 6.54 lakh people got certificates even though they were too young according to the rules.
Some roles required people to be at least 18 years old with a valid driver’s licence. Yet 1,142 children under 18 got certified as drivers and chauffeurs.
For jobs requiring education beyond 9th standard, 8.09 lakh out of 60.7 lakh certified people did not have the required schooling. For jobs needing technical diplomas or certificates, 1.05 lakh people with no technical education or just basic literacy got certified.
The system had no way to check if someone was actually unemployed or a school dropout, even though the programme specifically targeted those groups.
Jobs That Never Happened
The programme promised to help people find work after training. Of the 56.14 lakh people certified in short-term training, only 23.18 lakh found jobs. That’s 41 out of every 100.
In Kerala, auditors called three companies listed as employers. Company A said it hired only five people out of the 14 the training centre claimed to have placed there. The appointment letters and salary slips for the other nine were fake. Company B said it hired none of the 17 people listed. Company C also hired none of its 18 listed placements.
The state government recovered Rs 22.33 lakh from the training centres that made false claims. They also blacklisted those centres.
In Uttar Pradesh, government data showed 12,616 people found jobs. The state agency had no records to prove it.
In Odisha, training partners did not provide bank details for 8,958 out of 9,593 certified students. Those students never got their Rs 500 payment.
In Rajasthan, only 150 students out of 23,754 certified received their Rs 500. In Uttar Pradesh, none of the 74,000 certified students got paid.
Money Kept, Money Wasted
The National Skill Development Corporation runs the programme. After auditors pointed it out, the corporation returned Rs 12.16 crore in interest it had earned on government money but kept for itself.
The corporation also charged Rs 46.36 crore in administrative expenses. The rules allowed only Rs 22.23 crore. The excess was Rs 24.13 crore.
The corporation was supposed to give Rs 32.21 crore to district-level skill committees. It never sent the money. The corporation said the committees never asked for it.
Out of eight states audited, Bihar used only Rs 5.96 crore out of Rs 36.82 crore it received. Odisha spent Rs 7.39 crore out of Rs 27.71 crore and returned the rest with Rs 6.39 crore in interest. Maharashtra still holds Rs 18.94 crore unspent.
No Plan, No Direction
The audit found the government ran the programme without a long-term plan. Three different phases launched between 2015 and 2022. Each phase had different rules, different timelines, and different budgets.
The National Policy for Skill Development said India needed to train 402.9 million people by 2022 across 24 sectors. The programme focused on the wrong sectors and the wrong states. It trained people in jobs where few positions existed and ignored sectors crying out for workers.
The Construction sector needed 28.37 per cent of all trained workers. The programme provided only 3.21 per cent of its training there. The Retail, Electronics, and Apparel sectors together needed only 9.93 per cent of workers. They got 40 per cent of the training.
The National Council for Vocational Education and Training was set up in December 2018 to set standards and regulate the programme. By 2022, it still had not written many of the rules needed to run the programme properly.
What Government Says Now
The Ministry of Skill Development said it has fixed the problems. It claims the fourth phase launched in March 2022 uses better technology, stricter checks, and Aadhaar-based identity verification.
The ministry said it now requires face authentication and location-tagged attendance. It said it created live dashboards to track training and set up systems to get feedback from students.
The ministry said it issues certificates with QR codes that can be verified. It said it conducts surprise inspections and penalizes centres that break rules.
In February 2025, the Union Cabinet approved another Rs 8,800 crore to restructure the programme. The details of how the money will be used remain unclear.
The Economic Survey of 2023-24 noted that only 4.4 per cent of Indians aged 15 to 29 have any formal vocational or technical training. In 2017, a government report said only 4.69 per cent of the total workforce had formal skill training.
Seven years and Rs 10,000 crore later, those numbers have barely moved.
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