The 70-Lakh Job Vacancy India Forgot to Apply For

Applications under India's flagship apprenticeship scheme have collapsed by more than 90 percent in three years. The vacancies haven't gone anywhere. So where have all the applicants gone?

Imagine walking into a job fair with a hundred booths. Every booth offers a real, paid government opening. The hiring managers, sleeves rolled up, are practically waving at you. And yet, for every hundred aspiring people who walked in three years ago, only nine are showing up today in 2026.

This scenario is something that has happened to one of India's most important employment programmes.

According to a Business Standard article published on 21 June 2026, applications under the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS) fell to a six-year low in 2025. The number speaks for itself. Just 4,01,560 applications were generated through the year in 2025. The lowest figure since 2019.

You might assume the slump in applications for NAPS is cyclical. A bad year. A passing phase. Maybe young Indians, in 2025, were simply choosing other career paths.

But the numbers tell a different story. A very stranger one.

The Vanishing Act

Let us trace the line backward and the shape of the decline in applications becomes clear.

In 2022, applications for NAPS had peaked at 4.28 million. By 2023, they had declined to 2.97 million. In 2024, the figure fell further to 2.53 million.

And in 2025, just 4.01 lakh applications. More than 90 per cent below the 2022 peak.

Read that sentence again, slowly. It sounds wrong because it nearly is.

When a popular restaurant loses 90 per cent of its customers in three years, the explanation is usually obvious: the food got worse, the prices doubled, a rival opened down the street. Something visible, something traceable, something you could point a finger at.

But none of that happened here. In fact, the opposite did.

According to the NAPS scheme's public dashboard, a cumulative 7.7 million vacancies have been created since NAPS began.

More than 7.08 million of them remain available according to the dashboard.

To put that in plain language: seventy lakh apprenticeship opportunities are sitting open in India today. And last year, only four lakh people bothered to apply.

It is, by almost any honest measure, the most lopsided supply-demand chart in the Indian labour market.

So Where Have the Applicants Gone?

This is the question we at Veranda RACE set out to answer.

We’ve surfaced two theories as the country's most credible voice on skilling and competitive exam coaching.

The first answer is almost embarrassingly mundane: most of India's graduates have never even heard of NAPS and their apprenticeship vacancies.

The Apprentices Act of 1961, a piece of legislation older than India's first Five-Year Plan was finished, actually requires eligible companies to engage apprentices within a prescribed range of 2.5 to 15 per cent of their workforce.

Many establishments have yet to fully comply with this legislation.

Which is to say: the awareness gap about NAPS isn't simply a problem of young Indians not knowing where to apply. It's also a problem of large Indian companies not bothering to enforce a law that has existed for sixty-five years.

The second theory is less polite, the wage problem. This is where the harder truth lives.

An apprentice in India today earns around ₹15,000 a month. For a graduate in a smaller town say Patna, Coimbatore or Indore and relocating to Mumbai, Chennai or Delhi on that salary is a financial dead-end.

The cost of a shared room in Anna Nagar, Andheri or Karol Bagh alone could eat the entire stipend. Add transport, food and the occasional family obligation and the equation collapses.

The candidates would rather work in their own villages and earn similar wages and enjoy a lower cost of living.

Low wages for apprentices and barriers to mobility continue to be the larger and more pertinent problem.

So, you have two forces working in quiet alignment. Most young Indians don't know NAPS exists. And the ones who do, can't make the maths work.

That is how a country generates a six-year low.

What the Headlines Missed

Here is the strangest part of the story.

While the macro picture showcases decline, the picture in one corner of the economy is doing exactly the opposite.

In the first half of 2026 alone, India's public sector banks and state-owned insurance companies have quietly issued a flood of apprenticeship notifications.

They have not made front-page news. But add them up and the scale becomes difficult to ignore:

State Bank of India Apprentice 2026 - 7,150 vacancies

Punjab National Bank Apprentice 2026 - 5,138 vacancies

Bank of Baroda Apprentice 2026 - 5,000 vacancies

Central Bank of India Apprentice 2026 - 4,500 vacancies

Union Bank of India Apprentice 2026 - 1,865 vacancies

Punjab & Sind Bank Apprentice 2026 - 615 vacancies

NIACL (New India Assurance) Apprentice 2026 - 550 vacancies

Bank of India Apprentice 2026 - 400 vacancies

That is over 25,000 apprenticeship roles from eight public sector institutions and we have not yet counted LIC, GIC, Canara Bank or the many state-run banks and insurance firms that issue smaller notifications throughout the year.

These are not coffee-fetching internships. They are twelve-month structured programmes inside live bank and insurance company offices and branches.

Real customer-facing work. Stipends in metro postings sometimes rise above the ₹15,000 baseline.

And in more cases than the official notification admits, the apprenticeship becomes a quiet on-ramp into a permanent role, the kind of role those same applicants are spending years preparing for through coaching classes and mock tests.

In other words: while NAPS reports 7.08 million empty seats and just four lakh applicants, the banking, financial services and insurance sector, the very industry millions of young Indians are training to enter, is opening its doors wider than it has in years.

The doors to government banks, insurance companies and other firms are open. The hall is empty.

The Deeper Story

What the NAPS data is really documenting is a kind of national disconnect.

Vacancies for graduates exist. Candidates are not applying. Each side, in its own way, is reaching across a chasm and missing.

But the chasm tells you something larger about modern India.

India does not have a jobs crisis in the way the term is usually deployed. It has, far more uncomfortably, an information crisis.

Millions of young graduates are sitting in their homes, scrolling social media and looking at LinkedIn bulletins, preparing earnestly, exhaustively for "their dream job”.

Meanwhile, seventy lakh apprenticeship roles, many of them inside the very banks and public sector institutions they hope to one day work in, sit untouched.

The very gap between preparation and experience, the gap most Indians spend their twenties trying to cross, was supposed to be bridged by precisely the apprenticeships now going unclaimed.

If awareness is the bottleneck, then a content from Veranda RACE like this is a small attempt to widen it. We’ve been consistently posting about Apprentice notifications through Veranda RACE blog and our YouTube channels to notify our students and other aspirants.

If wages are the bottleneck, then that is a policy conversation the Indian Government will eventually have to confront. No amount of awareness, after all, can fix an opportunity that simply doesn't pay enough.

But until one of those bottlenecks is resolved, the statistics will keep telling the same quiet, strange story.

Seventy-seven lakh vacancies created. Seventy-point-eight lakh of them still empty.

And nine out of every ten people who used to show up in 2022, simply choosing not to anymore. That, in the end, is not a jobs crisis.

It is something quieter and stranger and harder to fix.