The Prime Minister Internship Scheme (PMIS) is approaching its second anniversary with a sobering lesson for employment policy: Creating an opportunity on paper is not the same as creating one that people consider worth taking. Across its first three rounds, companies posted about 400,000 internship opportunities, but only 39% translated into offers and just 20% of those offered internships actually joined.
The first two rounds were particularly disappointing. Round 1 saw 60,866 offers produce only 8,760 joiners, of whom 4,698 subsequently dropped out; Round 2 generated 71,192 offers but only 7,300 joiners, with 2,648 dropping out. Round 3 has improved substantially, with 14,620 candidates joining against 25,794 offers, although completion rates are not yet known. The numbers are a useful reality check on the belief that India’s employment challenge can be addressed simply by creating more subsidised openings. An opportunity workers do not consider worth taking is hardly an opportunity.
To its credit, the government has responded to some early weaknesses. Monthly financial assistance has been raised to at least `9,000, the eligible age band widened to 18-25 years, and final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students included. But the experience points to deeper problems that cannot be fixed merely by increasing vacancies. Candidates make rational calculations about an internship’s value.
Relocating entails rent, food, and transport costs, besides the opportunity cost of foregoing other employment. Even Rs 9,000 may be inadequate for necessary relocation. If the work bears little relation to a candidate’s skills or career ambitions, the internship may have limited appeal. Location, pay, and aspiration mismatch have emerged as reasons for candidates leaving after joining. The policy challenge is to make internships worth accepting and completing, rather than simply expanding their supply.
The scheme’s fiscal performance underlines the gap between ambition and implementation. Against estimated expenditure of `2,000 crore in FY25, actual spending was about 1.5%; in FY26, actual expenditure was 0.9% of the Rs 10,831-crore estimate. Such extraordinary underspending suggests assumptions about scale ran far ahead of participation. The wrong response would be to compensate for poor conversion by raising targets or pressing companies to post more vacancies.
Instead, PMIS should be redesigned around the problems participants have revealed. Better geographical matching could reduce unnecessary relocation; where relocation is unavoidable, accommodation or additional support deserves consideration. Stipends should better reflect living costs. Companies should be assessed not on positions listed but on the quality of work, mentoring, skills imparted, and completion rates. These are better indicators of whether public support is producing value.
Most importantly, PMIS must change how it defines success. Its public dashboard should track the entire funnel — vacancies, applications, offers, joining rates, dropouts, and completions — across companies, sectors, and locations. It should then follow participants to establish how many secure regular employment and if those jobs use skills acquired during the internship.
Such information would identify companies and sectors where internships provide credible pathways into work, allowing public resources to flow towards models that deliver. It would also help policymakers distinguish between temporary participation and durable improvements in employability. India needs stronger bridges between education and employment, and PMIS can provide one. But its first two years suggest scale without relevance achieves little. The government should resist declaring success through ever-larger opportunity numbers. The test is not how many internships companies advertise, but how many youths complete them and move into productive employment.