Employment, skill development get another spending boost in FY26

Skill development Budget FY26

The labour and skill development ministry has got another shot in the arm, with the Budget 2025-26 allocating Rs 38,746.3 crore to the ministry, 80 percent from Rs 21,608 crore in the previous year.

A Moneycontrol analysis last year showed that the labour and skill development ministries will over the next five years spend nearly double of what they disbursed in the previous decade.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget for the current financial year laid the roadmap to spend Rs 2 lakh crore over the next five years, as the government geared up to implement its flagship skill development and internship programmes.

The government announced Rs 1.07 lakh crore for employment-linked incentive schemes and another Rs 93,000 crore for skill development initiatives for the current fiscal.

In its fourth iteration, the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana trained 2.4 million people, with earlier programmes having trained 13.7 million.

Allocation for skill development ministry has doubled since 2019-20. In FY25, the government is likely to spend Rs 4,520 crore on skill development compared with Rs 2,400 crore spent in 2019-20.