Published Jul 01, 2026 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated Jul 01, 2026 | 7:00 AM
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay speaking in the state Assembly..
Synopsis: TVK’s manifesto focuses heavily on education, skilling, and employment. Replacing the state’s Skill Wallet model with a system that connects the young to employers around the world could prove transformative…
As the two-month mark of the Vijay government approaches, conversations on whether his electoral promises will translate to performance have begun gathering steam. For Vijay and TVK (Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam), a key vote bank was the youth, and a central pillar of his electoral campaign was providing them with jobs and addressing the rising unemployment. Failing to address this could change admiration to frustration and disillusionment in a short time.
The challenge is significant considering the previous government, led by MK Stalin, delivered strong economic numbers. Tamil Nadu recorded a double-digit GSDP growth rate for two consecutive years and ranks first in female workforce participation, accounting for 42% of the women employed in India’s factories.
Despite these achievements, Tamil Nadu faces a quieter but politically significant crisis: rising unemployment.
With unemployment rising from 1.17% in 2021 to 5.2% in 2025, the state’s educated and skilled youth are struggling to find jobs. Despite success in skilling its youth, one of the most prominent challenges the job market faces is to make these skills trustworthy, discoverable, and verifiable, both for employers in the state and beyond. This is precisely the kind of challenge that digital public infrastructure (DPI), such as Verifiable Credentials (VC), could help address.
The previous DMK-led Tamil Nadu government has been largely successful in training its youth with industry-relevant skills, which has caught the interest of several top-tier employers. Tamil Nadu’s success lies in its Vetri Nichayam Mobile App, an app that connects youth to skilling programmes, stipends, training, and job placements. The TN Skill Corporation implements the scheme under the Chief Minister’s supervision.
The scheme integrates traditional institutions such as Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) with private training providers. To improve accessibility, the state provides stipends, apprenticeships, internships, and runs re-skilling initiatives such as Factory Skill Schools.
These programmes are linked through a digital Skill Wallet that stores training records and certifications. The level of digitisation in Tamil Nadu in the skills ecosystem stands out in comparison to any other state in India, where most states have failed to even provide an option to register for vocational training online. Odisha and Kerala are the other exceptions where commendable efforts have been taking place in digitising skilling institutions.
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TVK appears to understand the problem plaguing the youth in the state. Its election manifesto focuses heavily on education, skilling, and employment as its vision for the youth. They guarantee an apprenticeship training programme, a scheme that provides loans to young individuals to bolster entrepreneurship, incentives to companies in the state that employ 75% of the local population, and an unemployment allowance. On closer examination, it is evident that these promises fail to address any of the structural issues underlying unemployment. They rely only on the existing skilling and welfare framework.
Unemployment in the current economy does not arise solely from insufficient job creation but also from a host of structural issues that exist in the economy. One of these is the information asymmetry between employers and skilled workers. This leads to an inability to match employees with the right skills to the right employer, especially in the case of blue-collar workers.
In fact, reports have indicated that there is a growing demand for skilled blue-collar workers, accompanied by a rise in wages. Today, unless workers are registered through the government portal, they do not have any means to showcase all their skill certifications to an employer in a verifiable form. The result is that employers have to undergo an independent verification process that is often not feasible, forgoing the hire and thereby losing out on skilled and talented workers.
The biggest limitation of the Skill Wallet model was its centralised nature and closed architecture. For instance, a technician from Tirupur or Tiruchirappalli who has earned multiple certificates under this programme might find it hard to prove his credentials to a prospective employer in the Gulf.
This is because the Skill Wallet at present recognises Tamil Nadu government-approved courses, essentially closing doors to international or independent digital skilling platforms. While job opportunities remain accessible to those trained through these government-registered/recognised courses, these are restricted to those offered only by employers registered with the government job portal. As a result, the Skill Wallet, in its application, remains inaccessible to market players on both ends—skills providers and employers.
This is where Verifiable Credentials (VCs), which the United States, the European Union, Singapore and others in the world are turning to, can play a transformative role and lay the groundwork for providing more jobs for youth.
Verifiable Credentials are a decentralised form of data representation developed over the W3C standard, that can securely store qualifications, certificates, and any other issued documents, which can be verified directly with the original issuer. Aligning the Skill Wallet to VC standards would make it interoperable and globally relevant. Certifications earned through various educational or skilling institutions, right from schooling, college, or ITIs, could be stored in a digital wallet for real-time sharing and verification.
By bringing formal educational institutions into the fold, learners would be able to store and share credentials across universities, online platforms, and skilling institutions around the world in a single wallet. On the other hand, learners can also share the certificates that they have earned through government and non-government skilling institutions with the employer of their choice.
As these credentials can be shared globally, they can unlock new employment opportunities worldwide by enabling real-time verification for job applications and visa processes. It could move from a state-organised repository to a global skills passport.
An important caveat remains: VCs do not create jobs on their own. It could solve the issue of skills-jobs mismatch, where the skills ecosystem is already established. VCs are also a technological intervention, easier to adopt in states like Tamil Nadu, where digitisation of various actors involved is high, and a much more difficult challenge in other states.
In India and abroad, the momentum around VCs is growing rapidly. While this shift has not yet reached the skilling ecosystem, it may do so soon. With Tamil Nadu’s strong digital ecosystem, established skilling initiatives, and politically sensitive youth employment challenge, the State could benefit from aligning its Skill Wallet with a VC standard with low transition costs.
This could also be a space for Tamil Nadu and Vijay to lead India to a UPI-like moment for the education, skills, and jobs ecosystem. Whether Vijay grabs this opportunity as one to showcase his governance to his core vote bank, the youth, and the nation at large, remains to be seen. Tamil Nadu has already showcased to the country how to skill its youth; now it’s time to ensure that these skills are portable, trusted, and globally recognised.
Also Read: Vijay may soon discover that defeating Dravidian parties is easier than replacing them
(Views are personal. Edited by R Rajesh Kumar.)
