NEW DELHI– A group of industry leaders on Monday launched Hundred Million Jobs, a national initiative aimed at creating 10 crore jobs in India over the next decade, as the country grapples with the challenge of strong economic growth that has not been matched by employment generation.
The collaborative platform has been launched by Harish Mehta, co-founder of nasscom, A.J. Patel, founder of The Indus Entrepreneurs, and K. Yatish Rajawat, founder of The Centre for Innovation in Public Policy. The initiative comes at a time when India’s working-age population continues to expand rapidly, adding an estimated 12 million people each year.
To absorb new entrants into the labor force and fully realize its demographic dividend, India will need to generate about 8–9 million jobs annually over the next decade, industry leaders said.
“Building on the skills-driven success of nasscom and the global entrepreneurship ecosystem created by TiE, the Hundred Million Jobs Mission is a systems-led effort to strengthen job creators — entrepreneurs, MSMEs, and employers — by aligning skills, enterprise, data, and policy to deliver resilient, dignified livelihoods for the next generation,” Mehta said in a statement.
Patel said startups and small enterprises already contribute about 30 percent of India’s GDP and are the country’s largest employment generators. He added that the initiative will focus on strengthening entrepreneurship in smaller towns and districts.
“If India is to generate 8–9 million jobs a year, some structural barriers need to be addressed so entrepreneurship becomes an aspiration for many and a practical engine of mass employment,” Patel said.
While India remains among the fastest-growing major economies, employment growth has lagged behind. Automation and artificial intelligence are reshaping business models and reducing the number of traditional entry-level roles across sectors, including services and manufacturing. As a result, economic expansion risks becoming increasingly disconnected from job creation.
The initiative’s founders said this challenge also presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to build job-intensive industries. Against this backdrop, Hundred Million Jobs places entrepreneurship and reskilling at the center of India’s employment strategy, alongside other pillars that require strengthening.
The mission aims to make dignified, distributed, and resilient job creation a central measure of India’s development progress.
“India’s job challenge is largely a systems challenge,” Rajawat said. “Employment at scale depends on several factors, including business models and labor-intensive sectors, but most importantly it requires a mindset shift at both the business and government levels. The policy challenge is to embed job growth as a core objective of economic growth.”
He said the initiative is built around a seven-pillar framework designed to enable job creation across regions and sectors.
Hundred Million Jobs has been structured as a collaborative platform, drawing support from industry, civil society, and government to address India’s employment challenge at scale. (Source: IANS)
