Field Note 08 of 22

Azim Premji University

“If there are more jobs, the supply will adjust — including the skills.”

I'd expected a conversation about what's wrong with India's graduates — skills gaps, quality of education, readiness for work. That's not where it went.

Her point was simpler, and more clarifying: employment isn't fundamentally a supply problem. It's a demand problem. When real jobs exist, people and institutions adapt toward them quickly — skills follow demand far more readily than most policy conversations assume.

It reframed something I'd been circling for a while. The instinct is always to fix the student, the curriculum, the training program. Her instinct was to ask a different question first: is there actually enough real demand for this talent to grow into?

A simpler question than the one usually being asked — and possibly a more useful one.

Field Note 08