Since 2015, the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana — India’s flagship skill-training scheme — has spent roughly ₹14,450 crore and claims 1.3 crore certifications as proof it’s preparing young Indians for jobs. A Comptroller and Auditor General performance audit covering 2015 to 2022, tabled in Lok Sabha on December 18, 2025, suggests a large share of that proof doesn’t hold up.
The numbers are stark. Of 95,90,801 participants examined, 90,66,264 — 94.53% — had bank account details that were either blank, marked “N/A,” or filled with zeros, making it impossible to verify that a real payment reached a real person. Among the remaining records, 12,122 bank account numbers were shared across 52,381 different participants. Mobile numbers were fake or invalid in 96% of cases. And assessors — the people whose job is to independently confirm that training actually took place — were missing or untraceable in 97% of cases, meaning the scheme’s own verification layer barely existed.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Congress MP K.C. Venugopal, escalated the matter this year, tabling its own report in the May-June 2026 session. Its follow-up dug into what the money was actually spent on, and found a second problem sitting on top of the first: 40% of trainees were trained for low-demand sectors like apparel, electronics and retail, while only 0.48% were trained in food processing and just 3.8% in tourism — sectors with real hiring demand. Only 41% of everyone trained under the scheme ever got placed in a job.
This isn’t an isolated failure. A separate CAG audit of Ayushman Bharat, India’s flagship health insurance scheme, found — in a 2023 report still being cited in ongoing accountability debates — that hospitals had billed and been paid for treating patients the scheme’s own records showed as already dead, and that hundreds of thousands of enrollments were linked to the same handful of mobile numbers. Different scheme, different ministry, same underlying pattern: enrollment and disbursement numbers built the government’s success story, while almost nobody checked whether the person behind each number was real, alive, or ever actually served.
None of this means no one benefited from these schemes — millions likely did. What it means is that when a government cites “X crore trained” or “Y crore covered” as evidence a program is working, that number may be measuring how much money moved, not how many lives it actually reached.
Sources: The Wire (“Dummy Emails, Strange Bank Account Numbers, Closed Centres”) · National Herald (“New CAG reports flag massive govt failures”; “One scam, many schemes”) · Countercurrents / The Federal / Newsgram (CAG PMKVY audit coverage, Dec 2025) · Plutus IAS / GK365 (PAC report, May-June 2026 session, K.C. Venugopal) · The420.in (CAG PMKVY fake bank accounts, mobile numbers, assessor findings) · Business Standard / Medical Dialogues (Ayushman Bharat CAG audit, 2023) · Deccan Herald / Scroll.in / Tribune India (₹6.97 crore PM-JAY dead-patient payments) · Careers360 (PMKVY 4.0 current status) · CAG.gov.in (official audit reports)
