What does a skilled worker look like in 2026? The answer is becoming harder to fit into the old categories. At the WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai this month, Indian competitors will take part in 63 of 64 skills. For the first time, India will enter 11 categories, including unmanned aerial systems, aircraft maintenance, intelligent security technology, software testing, optoelectronic technology and digital interactive media design. Nearly 70 competitors will represent the country.

The list is revealing. It includes jobs that sit at the intersection of several disciplines: mechanics and electronics, healthcare and precision manufacturing, software and quality assurance, aviation and advanced diagnostics. Drones are no longer simply flying machines; they are becoming tools in agriculture, infrastructure and public services. Security systems increasingly rely on sensors, AI-enabled surveillance and automated responses. Optoelectronics has applications ranging from healthcare to communications and advanced manufacturing.

For India, this raises a question that matters well beyond a competition in Shanghai: are the country’s workers being prepared for the jobs that industries are beginning to need?

A Different Kind of Skills Shortage?

India’s employment conversation often swings between two extremes—too few jobs for a large young population, and too few people with the skills employers want. Both can be true. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 63% of workers in India will require training by 2030. About 12% are not expected to receive the upskilling they need, representing more than 70 million workers.

The pressure is coming partly from technology. Indian employers expect AI and machine learning, big data and security-related roles to grow rapidly over the coming years. They also anticipate greater demand arising from developments in areas such as computing, semiconductors and quantum technologies.

But technological change does not create only jobs with “AI” or “data” in their titles. It changes the work done by people in existing occupations. An aircraft maintenance worker, for example, may now need to understand increasingly complex electronic and mechanical systems. Industrial technicians are working with machinery that requires more sophisticated diagnostics. Agricultural workers and infrastructure teams are beginning to use drones. Software products need people who can test them systematically before they reach users. That is reflected in the new WorldSkills categories.

The Technician is Changing Too

The popular image of the technology worker is still largely that of a programmer sitting behind a screen. India’s new skills list tells a broader story. Heavy Vehicle Technology requires advanced diagnostic, repair and maintenance capabilities. Industrial Mechanics involves precision assembly, troubleshooting and optimisation of complex machinery. Aircraft Maintenance demands expertise across mechanical, electrical, fluid and structural systems. Software Testing requires workers to examine whether digital products function reliably.

These occupations are not replacing technology with human labour. They are occupations being reshaped by technology. As machines become more capable, the people who install, maintain, inspect, test and troubleshoot them become more important too. A factory may become more automated, but somebody still has to understand what happens when an automated system stops working. A drone can collect agricultural data, but somebody has to operate it, interpret its output and deal with what the machine cannot.

The skills shortage, therefore, is not confined to India’s technology sector. It is spreading into the technical occupations that support a technology-heavy economy.

Degrees may not tell the whole story

There is a related change taking place in how employers think about talent. The World Economic Forum reports that around 30% of companies in India expect skills-based hiring including removing degree requirements—to help address talent shortages. Globally, that figure is 19%. For young workers, that could prove consequential.

A qualification still matters. But in occupations where technology changes quickly, employers also need to know what a person can actually do. Can they diagnose a machine? Test software? Work with a drone system? Maintain an aircraft? Operate sophisticated equipment safely? That is where vocational and technical education becomes relevant to India’s much larger employment question. The issue is not whether vocational training should compete with university education. It is whether young people have enough routes into specialised work—and whether those routes are connected to what employers actually need.

India’s WorldSkills preparation is being supported by training institutions, industry partners and domain experts, including organisations working across manufacturing, software, retail, heavy industry and dental technology. That industry connection may be more important than the competition itself.

What happens after the medals?

India’s performance at international skills competitions has improved considerably. It rose from 29th at WorldSkills in 2015 to 13th in 2024 and ranked eighth in Asia at WorldSkills Asia 2025. But medals are a narrow measure of a country’s skills capacity. The larger question is whether specialised training reaches beyond a relatively small group of competitors.

Can an ITI student in a smaller Indian city access training in technologies that employers will need five years from now? Can a worker already in a factory retrain when the machinery changes? Can training institutions update equipment and curricula quickly enough? And will employers pay a premium for the skills they say they cannot find?

Those questions matter because India’s demographic advantage depends partly on what happens to its workforce after people leave the classroom. The WorldSkills categories offer a useful snapshot of where some of that work is heading. They bring together aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, software, security and drones—fields that once belonged to separate training systems.

That may be the most interesting part of India’s participation in Shanghai. The future of work is not arriving as one new profession. It is appearing inside existing ones, quietly changing what a mechanic, technician, designer, tester or maintenance worker is expected to know.

For millions of young Indians entering the labour market, that shift may matter far more than who takes home a medal.

AI in education is changing the teacher’s role from delivering information to developing critical thinking, ethical judgment, resilience and human connection. As AI becomes a powerful learning tool, teachers may become more important as mentors and guides.

Every few decades, technology forces higher education to step in front of an existential mirror. When search engines made the world’s information queryable in milliseconds, critics prematurely declared the traditional classroom obsolete. Today, as Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools evolve from search interfaces into systems capable of explaining corporate finance models, writing complex code, and breaking down multi-variable calculus step-by-step, we face a far more provocative question: If AI can explain everything, what is actually left for a teacher to teach?

AI in Education Is Changing What Teachers Need to Teach

For decades, higher education was built on an implicit assumption that the teacher’s primary job was the delivery of content. The educator was the traditional authority figure holding access to knowledge and transmitting it to passive recipients. But if education is reduced merely to information delivery, AI will indeed render the traditional teacher redundant. As academic leaders navigating a multidisciplinary university environment, we know that information is not wisdom, and an explanation is not true understanding. As AI becomes a ubiquitous, hyper-efficient personal tutor, the role of the teacher is not shrinking; it is undergoing a profound and necessary elevation.

Generative AI models are exceptional at providing fast answers, but they are fundamentally indifferent to truth, context, and nuance. They synthesise probabilistic patterns rather than human meaning. In a time when students can produce a well-written study of a business case or legal precedent in a matter of seconds, the main responsibility of educators is to teach students how to evaluate answers rather than how to obtain them. In the era of artificial intelligence, critical thinking is now about rigorous investigation rather than knowledge retrieval. Instructors must teach students how to analyse AI outputs, including how to spot algorithmic bias, find logical fallacies, confront minute errors, and comprehend the moral trade-offs and human costs associated with important choices. An algorithm cannot match the human mind’s ability to navigate ambiguity, which is necessary to develop this level of critical judgment.

Higher education is also a very emotional and social process. Vulnerability is necessary for learning; a pupil must first own their ignorance in order to acquire new information. While an AI can adjust to a student’s cognitive tempo, it is unable to recognise the faint spark of inquiry in a quiet seminar room, read the exasperation on a student’s face, or detect a sudden lack of confidence before a significant presentation. Teachers work as mentors, fostering character, ethical responsibility, and resilience. They foster collaborative environments where leadership thrives, set an example of sensitivity, and encourage discussion among peers who hold different opinions. A machine can outline the technical concepts of corporate governance or bioethics, but only a human mentor can instil the moral compass required to lead responsibly in an unpredictable world.

If AI can explain the what and the how, the teacher remains the master of the why.

Instead of replacing teachers, AI presents a unique opportunity by relieving them of repetitious explanations and mundane administrative duties. Teachers might recover their primary role as learning architects by delegating foundational drills and basic synthesis to automated technologies. Project-based challenges, real-world simulations, and interdisciplinary discussions where human collaboration is unavoidable are replacing passive lectures in forward-thinking educational institutions. In order to help students identify their unique skills, intellectual interests, and sense of agency, they concentrate on posing open-ended questions that lack tidy, algorithmic solutions.

As we evaluate the future of our educational institutions, we should not view AI as a competitor to the teacher, but as a clarity-enforcing mirror. If AI can explain the what and the how, the teacher remains the master of the why. As technology democratises access to knowledge at an unprecedented scale, the human touch in education becomes more valuable, not less. The future belongs not to machines that hold all the answers, but to human beings who can think critically, act ethically, collaborate empathetically, and lead with purpose. Guiding young minds to that destination is something only a teacher can do.

As global power becomes more multipolar, India’s universities could become important instruments of academic diplomacy, building influence through students, research and institutional partnerships.

In an era characterised by fragmented geopolitics, economic realignments, and the gradual decay of unipolar hegemony, statecraft has expanded far beyond classic military projection and commercial leverage. Modern influence relies heavily on attraction, ideological alignment, and institutional networking—the foundational components of soft power. For decades, international relations theorists evaluated soft power through the lens of cultural export, public diplomacy, and foreign aid. However, as global power shifts toward a multipolar architecture, higher education has emerged as one of the most vital strategic arenas for long-term influence. Knowledge ecosystems, research networks, and student mobility are no longer merely domestic educational metrics; they are instrumentalities of geopolitical positioning. Within this evolving international framework, India stands at a critical juncture where its vast higher education apparatus must transform from an internal developmental tool into a primary engine of regional and global academic diplomacy.

Academic Diplomacy: How India Can Turn Universities into Global Influence

Academic diplomacy is different from conventional foreign policy, as it has a different timeline. Economic sanctions and defence alliances yield results in the short term, whereas academic diplomacy makes an impact through generations of diplomatic relationships. This diplomacy includes various strategies, such as having international experts, opening branches of universities abroad and organising joint research projects that create new elite-to-elite relationships. When policymakers, scholars and influential people from abroad are educated in the host country, they acquire knowledge about its culture, legal systems and values. In the past, Western countries have used their educational establishment to promote their liberal values in the world, educating people from underdeveloped countries, and bringing them into their intellectual network.

In the multipolar international order, the balance of academic competition is moving away from being centralised. Emerging economies acknowledge that depending on outside sources of knowledge has implications of certain risks, from intellectual dependency to brain drain. For India, building a strong system of academic diplomacy is more than just prestige, it is a necessity from the geopolitical point of view as the largest democracy institutions are gaining their place as leaders of the Global South. The educational landscape of India provides an opportunity to expand its influence in the regions of Asia, Africa, and beyond.

India’s Historical Legacy and Modern Mandates

The idea of India as a global educational beacon is historically rooted in its ancient heritage. Long before the establishment of the contemporary nation-states, ancient education centres acted as international centres of wisdom, luring people from all over Eurasia with the promise of learning subjects such as philosophy, geography, medicine, and logic. After gaining independence, the Indian government engaged in making use of this heritage through providing training and scholarships to students from various nations of Africa, the Mideast, and South Asia through its Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programme.

​However, modern academic diplomacy demands a structural transition from historical nostalgia to modern institutional capacity. The contemporary global student population values institutional rankings, research infrastructure, seamless credit transfers, post-study work pathways, and political stability. While India’s premier technical institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), enjoy immense global brand recognition, their historically insular focus on domestic intake limited their direct role in international student recruitment. Recognising this limitation, recent structural interventions detailed in the official framework of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 have sought to reposition Indian higher education as globally integrated, aiming to increase international student enrolment and facilitate internationalisation at home.

Mechanisms of Projection: Institutional Footprints and Internationalisation

India’s contemporary academic diplomacy operates across three major vectors: international student recruitment, institutional offshore expansion, and strategic multilateral knowledge networks. Government-backed platforms like the official Study in India Portal were designed to streamline entry procedures, provide specialised scholarships, and market Indian higher education across target regions in Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. The value proposition is distinct: high-quality technical, medical, and liberal arts instruction delivered in English at a fraction of the cost of Western universities. By catering to price-sensitive students from developing nations, India builds goodwill and deepens economic and social linkages with emerging markets.

Concurrently, the outbound deployment of Indian public institutions marks a shift in state strategy. The launch of overseas campuses, detailed in official announcements for IIT Madras in Zanzibar and the establishment of IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi, signals a transition from passive recruitment to active global institutional presence. These campuses serve dual strategic functions. Locally, they address acute capacity deficits in high-tier technical training across host nations. Geopolitically, they establish permanent Indian institutional footholds in key oceanic and economic nodes, acting as hubs for joint technological innovation, industrial collaboration, and strategic regional presence.

Beyond physical campuses, multilateral platforms provide another crucial dynamic for academic influence. Through regional groupings and global South summits, India has increasingly prioritised academic collaboration, joint research grants, and climate-resilience research initiatives. By spearheading collaborative research in fields such as artificial intelligence, renewable energy, tropical medicine, and digital public infrastructure, India positions itself not as an extractive knowledge consumer, but as a co-creator of solutions tailored specifically for the developing world.

Structural Friction: Domestic Realities versus Foreign Policy Ambitions

In spite of its strategic aspirations for higher education, India is blocked by serious structural challenges in fulfilling its potential as an academic global power. The key obstacle continues to be the major disparities within the domestic academic setting. While elite state-owned universities provide first-class educational services, many entities of the academic system suffer from administrative issues, inconsistent infrastructural provisions, lack of teaching staff, and complex regulation. Academic diplomacy of a country depends very much on the quality of the academic institutions available in it; it is essential to maintain high standards at home in order to project one’s image to the world.

In addition, international students have troubles connecting to their academic surroundings, getting qualified help and assistance, and establishing diversity on campus. International researchers arriving in India face a wide range of bureaucratic issues connected to visa fixing, constraints applied to housing, and the lack of practical work opportunities.

Furthermore, the global competition for intellectual capital has intensified dramatically. Middle-income powers across Eurasia and East Asia are heavily subsidising their university sectors to attract international talent, creating a highly competitive landscape for global education. If India seeks to position its universities as preferred destinations for foreign talent, academic diplomacy must receive sustained fiscal backing, simplified regulatory oversight, and dedicated institutional autonomy to design programs tailored for foreign scholars.

​The Road Ahead: Building an Intentional Academic Statecraft

To create a robust academic presence in a multipolar world, India should incorporate its higher education strategy into its larger foreign policy framework. Educational diplomacy should work in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of External Affairs in order to function efficiently in time.

First, India must create specific scholarship schemes that would benefit future political, administrative, and technological leaders of the countries in the Global South. By providing fully merited scholarships to aspiring students from other countries, India will be able to reap high immediate diplomatic profits.

Second, authorities should give universities more operational autonomy when collaborating with foreign institutions. Making the process of obtaining dual degrees simpler, promoting joint degrees accreditation, and allowing more flexible systems of exchange can attract foreign universities and colleges to Indian institutions.

Third, academic diplomacy should not only be limited to STEM disciplines but should also span areas like social sciences, public policy, humanities, and environmental studies. In order to tackle complex global issues like climate change, digital ethics, poverty, and public health, India has a significant historical background with which it can be studied. Research institutions working on issues like Global South, simple innovation, and sustainable development should serve to transform Indian higher educational institutions into intellectual centres of the global governance debate.

​Ultimately, higher education represents one of the most versatile and durable forms of soft power available to a rising state. In a global order increasingly characterised by geopolitical friction and economic volatility, classrooms and research laboratories offer spaces for sustained collaboration and shared progress. By strengthening domestic academic standards, removing administrative barriers, and projecting institutional capability abroad, India can transform its higher education ecosystem into a pillar of international diplomacy—advancing its national interests while contributing meaningfully to the global pool of knowledge.