“‘Earn while you learn’ scheme needs to be strengthened to make vocational education and skill training meaningful.” Comment.

Learning that pays

'Earn while you learn' blends classroom study with paid work-based training. With only around 4 per cent of India's young workforce formally vocationally trained (PLFS), strengthening such schemes is central to making skill training aspirational rather than a last resort.

Why strengthening is needed

• Financial compulsion drives dropouts; a stipend lets poorer students continue education instead of choosing between wages and study.
• Learning-by-doing bridges the industry–academia gap that leaves many graduates unemployable despite degrees.
• Earning restores dignity of labour, countering the social stigma attached to vocational streams.

How to strengthen it

• Scale apprenticeships under NAPS and NATS with assured stipends and employer incentives, and promote degree-apprenticeship models on the pattern of Germany's dual system.
• Use the National Credit Framework to bank credits earned through work, enabling mobility between vocational and general education — as NEP 2020 envisages with its target of 50 per cent of learners gaining vocational exposure.
• Expand campus-based options: research assistantships, university earn-while-you-learn placements and paid internships embedded in curricula.
• Align courses with local industry clusters and emerging sectors — green energy, logistics, the care economy — backed by counselling and placement support.

Conclusion

When students can earn without abandoning learning, vocational education stops being a dead end and becomes a credible pathway to decent work — the true test of the Skill India mission.