Skilling the Numbers: A Critical Reading of CAG’s PMKVY Audit

A critical reading of the CAG’s performance audit reveals how India’s flagship skill scheme chased targets, certificates, and political credit—while employability, accountability, and evidence-based policy fell through the cracks.

By P. SESH KUMAR

New Delhi, December 20, 2025 — The Performance Audit of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) was expected to be a forensic examination of India’s flagship skill development experiment—one that consumed tens of thousands of crores, promised demographic dividends, and became a political and administrative showpiece. Instead, Report No. 20 of 2025 reads more like a careful cataloguing of operational infirmities than a hard-hitting interrogation of policy failure.

While the audit does surface serious deficiencies in training quality, certification credibility, placement outcomes, and monitoring mechanisms- none of which were not in public domain—it stops conspicuously short of holding the Union Ministry to account for repeated design churn, weak conceptual foundations, and an absence of evidence-based need assessment.

The Illusion of Scale and the Reality of Substance

PMKVY was conceived as a national response to India’s much-repeated paradox: millions of young people and millions of job vacancies that somehow never meet. From its inception in 2015, the scheme privileged scale over substance-targets over trajectories, enrolments over employability, certificates over skills. What the CAG audit demonstrates with clarity is that this obsession with numbers metastasised into systemic fragility: training centres mushroomed without credible capacity checks, assessments became ritualistic, and placements were reported with a creative elasticity that would make any statistician wince. Nothing spectacular which Government itself did not know.

Yet, what the report largely misses is the deeper question: Was the original diagnosis itself flawed? The audit does not seriously interrogate whether the skill gaps identified by the Union Government were grounded in labour market evidence, sectoral demand studies, or regional employment elasticity. The assumption that short-term training modules could compensate (perhaps the single biggest policy flaw) for structural deficiencies in education, industrial absorption, and wage incentives is accepted as a given, not challenged as a hypothesis that deserved rigorous testing.

A Ministry in Perpetual Motion, but Rarely in Reflection

One of the most glaring gaps in the audit lies in its treatment of the Union Ministry’s role-specifically, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. PMKVY went through multiple avatars-PMKVY 1.0, 2.0, 3.0-each promising to fix the flaws of its predecessor. Frequent guideline changes, shifting funding patterns, evolving roles for Sector Skill Councils, and changing assessment protocols created a moving target for states and training providers alike.

The CAG notes these modifications, but the examination remains descriptive rather than auditorial or prosecutorial. There is little attempt to evaluate whether this policy churn reflected learning or panic, strategic recalibration or reputational firefighting. The audit does not ask whether the Centre’s constant redesign diluted accountability, weakened institutional memory, and made longitudinal outcome evaluation almost impossible. By treating policy instability as background noise rather than a core governance failure, the audit sacrifices analytical depth for procedural neatness.

An ‘All India Performance Audit’-in Name More Than in Spirit

The report repeatedly invokes the phrase “All India Performance Audit,” but the architecture of the examination tells a different story. Only eight states were selected for detailed scrutiny. While sampling is an accepted audit tool, the report offers limited justification as to why these particular states were chosen, how representative they are of India’s labour market diversity, or whether high-performing and low-performing states were consciously balanced.

This raises an uncomfortable question: can a scheme whose raison d’être is national uniformity and scale be meaningfully evaluated through such a narrow administrative lens? The absence of a transparent rationale for state selection weakens the report’s claim to pan-Indian inference and leaves room for the criticism that the audit findings, though valid, are not fully generalisable. And the report says upfront that CAG’s auditing standards were followed, whatever this may mean to a layman or a concerned citizen- who is a stakeholder of CAG reports according to its Vision and Mission Statement.

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What the Audit Revealed-and What Governments Already Knew

To the audit’s credit, it does marshal evidence on issues that governments were aware of but had not confronted decisively: low placement rates, weak employer engagement, poor post-certification tracking, and inflated success claims. The report brings these together in one coherent narrative and corroborates them with field-level evidence.

However, the uncomfortable truth is that very little in the report would have come as a genuine revelation to either the Union Government or the states. Independent evaluations commissioned earlier, parliamentary committee observations, and even internal ministry reviews had flagged similar concerns. The audit consolidates these into an authoritative document-but does not dramatically expand the frontier of knowledge.

Evaluation Without Evaluators

Perhaps the most damning indictment—subtly noted but insufficiently emphasised—is the absence of robust, independent third-party evaluation. While sporadic studies were commissioned, there was no institutionalised, arm’s-length evaluation framework embedded into PMKVY’s design. The audit notes this deficiency but does not squarely assign responsibility for this lapse to the Union Ministry, despite evaluation being a core element of results-based governance.

CAG itself conducted limited beneficiary surveys, but their representativeness is constrained by sample size, geography, and the inherent difficulty of verifying self-reported employment outcomes. The audit does not deploy advanced data analytics, AI-driven pattern recognition, or geo-tagging validation at scale. In an era where real-time labour market data and digital verification are feasible, the methodological conservatism of the audit feels like a missed opportunity.

Recommendations: Sensible and Vague but Not Disruptive

The recommendations are eminently sensible but vague generalization: strengthen monitoring, improve trainer quality, ensure better convergence with industry, enhance placement verification, and stabilise guidelines. Yet, they are also familiar. None fundamentally challenge the underlying premise of PMKVY-that supply-side skilling, in the absence of parallel job creation and wage rationalisation, can deliver transformational outcomes.

The recommendations are more incremental than practical. They tidy the machinery; they do not question whether the machine itself was correctly designed.

Too Late to Shape the Narrative?

Finally, the timing. By the time this audit was tabled in 2025, PMKVY had already undergone multiple redesigns, and newer skill initiatives were being rolled out with fresh branding. Auditing a scheme from 2015 to 2022 in 2024 inevitably dulls the edge of accountability. The findings risk being treated as historical commentary rather than triggers for real-time correction.

Performance audits derive their greatest value when they intersect with policy inflection points. In this case, the audit arrives after the narrative has moved on-making it easier for the executive to acknowledge deficiencies without bearing their political or administrative cost.

Lessons Learnt

The PMKVY audit underscores a deeper lesson for public accountability in India. Performance auditing cannot remain implementation-centric when the real failures lie upstream-in policy conception, need assessment, and incentive design. Calling an audit “All India” is not enough; it must interrogate national assumptions, not merely state-level execution. Schemes built on aspirational numbers must be audited with uncomfortable questions, not comfortable samples. And above all, delay is not a neutral administrative choice-it actively erodes the corrective power of audit.

(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)

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