Mohammed Emroz (name changed), a final-year BTech student from Jamia Millia Islamia, has had just 20 days of hands-on exposure to machines and tools. As a mechanical engineering student, he should have had at least a year of practical training by now – something typically gained through internships.
However, the companies he hopes to join will demand far more experience, despite him being a fresher.
The job market is grim. In engineering alone, over 15 lakh graduates enter the workforce every year in India, and around 83% of them fail to secure placements.
And that’s just one field. There are over a dozen other professional courses where internships are critical for landing a job. Most students in India end up with neither meaningful internships nor employment opportunities.
For Emroz, securing even 20 days of exposure at a PSU required pulling out all the stops.
He said that even at a reputed university like Jamia Millia Islamia, there was little support from the placement committee in securing internships, and minimal encouragement from professors to learn subjects in an applied manner. After submitting dozens of applications, he received just one response, from a PSU in a different city.
“But I had to take it, despite the distance. If I didn’t, I would have lost a semester credit, and there’s no guarantee I would have found another internship,” he told India Today Digital.
Emroz paid for his round trip to Mumbai, along with accommodation and food for a month, just to learn how to safely handle basic tools like hammers and drills. “Nothing was actually taught during the internship,” he said. But at least he earned one semester credit.
Experts that India Today Digital spoke to said the internship ecosystem in India largely mirrors Emroz’s experience. Either students don’t get internships at all, or they end up with little more than a certificate. This partly explains why nearly 40% of Indian graduates under the age of 25 remain unemployed.
The problem with internships and skill-building is multifaceted. To begin with, the very nature of internships in India appears to be changing.
Experts and students told India Today Digital that firms across sectors now prefer hiring a smaller number of trainees instead of a larger pool of interns. On paper, trainees are positioned a level above interns, but are often just as unskilled. While trainees receive stipends, like interns, they are frequently kept off payrolls and offered no legal guarantees of employment.
According to industry insiders, this trend is shrinking an already limited pool of genuinely employable talent.
GOVT’S EFFORTS TO BRIDGE THE EDUCATION-INDUSTRY GAP
To bridge the education–industry gap, the government rolled out the PM Internship Scheme two years ago. However, despite allocations exceeding Rs 12,000 crore so far, participation has remained low.
In 2024, the scheme received 6.21 lakh applications. Of these, only 8,760 candidates joined, and just 3,605 have completed their internships so far, amounting to barely 0.58% of total applicants.
The scheme’s uptake remained dismal in subsequent years as well. As of March 9, 2026, more than 7,290 candidates had dropped out before completing their internships, according to government data.
However, the Centre has acknowledged the need for reforms and has introduced changes to both stipend and eligibility. From March 2026, the monthly assistance has been increased from Rs 5,000 to Rs 9,000. The minimum age has been lowered from 21 to 18, while the maximum age has been raised from 24 to 25.
THE MULTIFACETED CRISIS, AND WHAT IT TAKES TO STAND OUT IN THE CV PILE
Another major issue that often goes undiscussed is the shrinking number of people willing, or able, to train interns. In hands-on fields such as media, engineering, and law, the culture of learning on the job has eroded to some extent, largely because skilled professionals are under extreme work pressure. As a result, interns are often left to fend for themselves.
However, when an intern is labelled a trainee, the treatment appears to change. “Trainees are treated as future colleagues, unlike regular interns, who are often there just for the certificate,” said Amrita Singh, a Mumbai-based lawyer who has worked with multiple litigation firms across India.
So, in a country with such deep inequality, particularly in education, how does one acquire skills and break into these closed networks?
The answer often lies in privilege: personal contacts, industry connections, or any form of leverage that can push a CV ahead of dozens of equally capable applicants competing for a single opening. In fields like chartered accountancy and journalism, some degree of rigour still remains, with interns getting opportunities to work in real-time environments.
In fact, the intent to hire freshers has risen to 73% in the current half-year, indicating growing employer confidence in entry-level candidates. In some sectors, such as retail, hiring intent has surged from 41% in HY1 2025 to 91% in HY1 2026, according to Shantanu Rooj.
However, this trend does not extend to technical fields like engineering, where both jobs and internships remain scarce.
Career counsellors and representatives from international firms say that a handful of trainees are increasingly replacing a larger pool of interns.
TRAINEESHIPS ON THE RISE, BUT INTERNSHIPS WERE NEVER A DEFAULT WAY TO GET A JOB
Ankur Agarwal, a career management professional with over two decades of experience, believes that internships are not declining across sectors, because they were never a standalone culture in India to begin with.
“They have largely been tied to specific professional courses. Outside of these, internships exist mainly as part of structured academic requirements, such as summer internships in MBA programmes or mandatory stints embedded in curricula,” he said.
Landing a decent internship is also a chance encounter in India. “Depending on your capability, you might get a meaningful internship, or you might struggle and somehow manage to get a certificate,” Agarwal added.
The system, he suggested, hasn’t fundamentally changed, what has changed is how institutions and companies are working around it.
Many colleges, particularly in MBA and engineering programmes, now allow students to take up full-time roles in their final semester or even earlier, designating them as trainees. This effectively becomes on-the-job training, but at a fraction of the cost to companies. “If a campus placement would typically offer six lakh per annum, the same student might be taken in as a trainee at a stipend of Rs 15,000,” he explained.
“Companies get cheap workforce, and colleges are satisfied because ‘placements’ are also done,” he added.
These arrangements do convert into pre-placement offers (PPOs) in a majority of cases. “Around 75–80%,” said Agarwal.
THE TRAINEE TAKEOVER, THE PROS, AND MOSTLY THE CONS
Vivek Rai, who works in the manufacturing solutions division of a leading American conglomerate in Mumbai, says his organisation still hires interns. However, since the pandemic, trainees now account for nearly 70% of the positions that were once reserved for interns.
“I didn’t want to go on record for this, but it’s a fact, the few interns we still take are mostly through referrals. Students from privileged and well-connected backgrounds can still make it to MNC offices while they’re in college the rest are hired as trainees straight out of college,” Rai said.
One advantage for interns who work with multiple companies is the early exposure they gain in their second or third year of engineering. “Trainees, on the other hand, are usually very fresh and have to be taught everything from scratch. These are students who never secured an internship but have the aptitude to be engineers. So, it becomes like a crash course in engineering, after they’ve already earned their degrees,” Rai explained.
Rai himself, as a BTech student between 2004 and 2008, completed three internships at software companies in Bengaluru and Mumbai. “I was lucky to get those internships without any connections. That route, unfortunately, has narrowed significantly now. Back in the 2000s, the culture was to join as an intern, impress your seniors, and convert that into a full-time job,” he said.
“Now, you just arrive with a GPA and zero practical knowledge,” Rai added.
VERY BASIC WORK HANDED TO TRAINEES
As trainees, the work these professionals do, at least for the first few months, is very basic, or at least, rarely high-stakes. Shruti Bansal, a lawyer at an e-commerce platform in Bengaluru, explained that trainees handle “lower-stakes but high-volume work” such as standard agreements, research and back-office tasks.
High-confidentiality or critical matters stay with seniors at Bansal’s company.
In Vivek Rai’s firm, however, the reliance on entry-level hands gets “quite real” when a trainee shows traits like attention to detail, ownership over the task, and proactiveness. “Those who are very serious and have a good aptitude learn to work fast, but most do not reach that level at least for one year,” said Rai, adding, “It’s low-key frustrating to hire an intern for a full-year.”
Vivek invests personal time walking interns through the entire transaction lifecycle; intent, execution, repercussions, because “academics rarely prepare students for real jobs.”
He called trainees an investment, but admitted that time is always short in a fast-paced setting like his workplace.
On the other hand, Shruti Bansal’s team runs induction sessions and gives ad-hoc guidance when handing over new tasks to trainees. “But there is no dedicated mentorship slot per se,” added Bansal.
“People are willing to hand-hold, but the process eats into productive time,” said Bansal.
Both Rai and Bansal agreed that the culture of landing a job has shifted as internships have become scarcer.
Bansal said, “In law, the mandatory four-to-five internships required by Bar Council rules have kept the number of internships on the CVs steady, but the quality of exposure has gone down, because they know they are not getting PPOs, and will be hired as trainees, mostly through the university’s placement cell.”
Responses India Today Digital received from Mumbai’s Mithibai College (affiliated to Mumbai University) and NMIMS, indicated that at least second and third year students, in degrees such as engineering and applied statistics, intern for certificates rather than learning real skills.
“This is why pre-vetted trainees are better, because we generally don’t have the time to deal with, say, a dozen interns,” added Rai.
TIER-1 COLLEGES STILL OPEN DOORS, BUT PERFORMANCE KEEPS YOU IN THE ROOM
Being from a top college still carries weight, and students might secure an internship sooner than those from other institutions, but it’s not always guaranteed.
Surbhi Agarwal, a lawyer with Assetz Property Group in Bengaluru, said a tier-1 background “reflects consistency, discipline, and the ability to compete at a high level”, so expectations are naturally higher. But she added, “Pedigree may open the door, but performance is what keeps you in the room.”
“In most places, however, the college tag doesn’t matter,” said Bansal. Some law firms and companies, who still take trainees, prefer tier-1 college interns, but “expectations stay pretty much standard across the board,” she added.
“A bare-minimum work ethic is required regardless of which college you’re from,” said Vivek Rai.
No one expects trainees to arrive fully formed. What matters is “the ability to learn on the go, adapt quickly, and deliver efficiently,” said Bansal.
The real crisis, however, is not that interns have become poor quality. It is the fact that they have disappeared. The two are interrelated.
Internships once bridged education and employment. Employers earlier had a pool of interns with industry exposure at different levels, which acted as a steady hiring pipeline. Today, that pool has largely disappeared. The system seemingly has faith in young talent, but the absence of this pipeline is making things even tougher for graduates.