Why young Indians are not interested in the prime minister’s ambitious internship scheme

Sometime around September 2024, Santosh Kumar’s parents heard on the radio about the newly launched Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme. They told their son, an engineering graduate, about it.

Kumar’s father is a farmer and his mother, a homemaker. They live in a small village in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district. They had worked hard to put their children, a son and a daughter, through engineering college. While their daughter managed to find a job, their son, who graduated with a BTech degree in computer science in 2023, did not hear back from any of the companies to which he had applied.

The couple thought the internship scheme might offer their son an opportunity to land a job. So, they urged him to apply.

When he applied in October, he found the process was “very simple”. He had to supply information about his education and his skills, and from a list of job profiles, choose five that he thought would suit him. “However, they didn’t provide any information about the companies that were offering the jobs, so I just picked at random,” he said.

He received a positive response within a few days of applying, and was asked to appear for an interview. Within seven days of the interview, Kumar received...

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