March 13, 2025
NEW DELHI – Photographs of Kyoto’s Kiyomizu-dera Temple and Mount Fuji on central Honshu line a wall in a large, airy classroom.
Here, more than 20 young Indian men have their gaze trained on beginner-level Japanese language workbooks.
Their teacher walks around the room, randomly quizzing them on the Japanese equivalents for basic English words. “Factory,” she asks a student, to which he responds correctly, “kojo”.
The students put their best linguistic foot forward. Picking up Japanese language skills quickly here could prove to be a game changer for these young graduates in their 20s desperate for a professional breakthrough.
Those who clear a pre-screening Japanese language test later in March stand a chance to be recruited as farmers in Japan.
Compared with a monthly salary of 30,000 rupees (S$460) or less as construction or factory workers in India, they could earn 160,000 yen (S$1,436) each month as farmworkers in Japan.
Among the students at the recently inaugurated government-backed NSDC International Academy in Greater Noida, a city near Delhi, is Mr Prabhat Tiwari, a 29-year-old with an entrepreneurial spirit, from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
A trained engineer with two degrees in civil engineering, he was stuck in low-paying jobs in India’s construction sector. Now, he is following his father’s footsteps in a farming career.
He plans to eventually set up an agricultural start-up with the farming experience he hopes to pick up overseas. “I don’t think I will get a better place to learn modern high-tech farming than in Japan,” he added.
Japan and some European nations are among several developed countries with ageing populations and labour shortages that are increasingly turning to India’s large young talent pool to meet their demand for workers.
It is a win-win situation, not just for recruiters abroad who can hardly find locals to fill jobs in sectors such as construction and nursing, but also for millions of young, skilled Indians such as Mr Tiwari who are hungry for well-paying jobs that remain elusive in India.
Bridging this global talent supply-demand gap through its new academy is India’s NSDC International, a subsidiary of the National Skill Development Corporation, a public-private partnership that operates under the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.
NSDC International serves both as an upskilling agency for Indians as well as a platform for international recruiters to hire workers from the country. Its academy in Greater Noida, the first such centre, is dedicated to training Indian workers interested in taking up jobs such as farmers, hotel staff, nurses and automotive technicians abroad.
Young Indian men taking Japanese lessons at the NSDC International Academy in Greater Noida. PHOTO: THE STRAITS TIMES
Opened formally on Feb 6, the centre currently offers German and Japanese language courses. It also provides upskilling in nursing. Courses in the fully residential academy can range from three months to nine months.
The fee is relatively affordable; for instance, a nine-month full-time Japanese course is priced at around 90,000 rupees, which includes the cost of tuition, lodging and the tests mandated by recruiters.
More languages and domain-specific skills such as those for the aviation industry are going to be added, with 10 additional such academies expected to open across the country by the end of March 2026. This comes as the government aims to promote safe international mobility for Indian workers.
The NSDC International Academy offers language classes to Indians hoping to work abroad in the construction and healthcare sectors. PHOTO: THE STRAITS TIMES
Mr Alok Kumar, the chief executive of NSDC International, told The Straits Times that language training has become important, besides technical and domain-specific training, as recruitment requests to the agency increasingly come from non-Anglophone countries such as Germany and Japan.
He said that employers from those countries often ask for such training as familiarity with the local language is one of the most crucial needs to settle in well in a foreign country.
Since its inception in October 2021, NSDC International has helped place more than 30,000 Indian workers in various roles spanning sectors such as construction, healthcare, agriculture and hospitality in over 20 countries in West Asia, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as Australia, Europe and Japan.
The goal is to take this number up to more than a million in another three years, something the agency hopes to achieve through its growing list of agreements with governments and recruitment partners around the world.
Faculty and students at the academy, which has trained more than 30,000 Indian workers in various roles across 20 countries. PHOTO: THE STRAITS TIMES
NSDC International is also currently talking to private entities in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand regarding similar agreements to hire Indian workers for construction and healthcare roles.
Mr Kumar added that upskilling at the academy is “demand-driven”, so that it can cater to the specific needs of its international recruiters. For instance, a nursing training lab has been set up at the academy with support from Sompo Care, a Japanese firm that provides nursing care services, to train Indian healthcare workers exclusively for Japan.
According to a 2024 study by the International Labour Organisation and the Institute for Human Development, the share of educated youth – those aged between 15 and 29 – among all unemployed Indians stood at 65.7 per cent in 2022, up from 54.2 per cent in 2020.
Other than the lack of jobs, many Indian youth, such as Ms Aimey Lalu, also find themselves stuck in low-paying jobs in India.
The 24-year-old, who is studying German at the NSDC International Academy and hopes to be recruited as a nurse in Germany, said a nurse’s starting monthly pay at a private hospital in Kerala is anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 rupees. This is far lower than the estimated starting pay of around 150,000 rupees for caregivers and even more for registered nurses in Germany.
“We can’t even repay our (educational) loans when we work in India, but abroad, we will get a better salary package,” she said.
NSDC International has been aggressively helping international recruiters find the right talent, via recruitment exercises online as well as on campus.
When Mr Umang Khalasi, 24, an automobile technician in Surat in Gujarat, received an e-mail from NSDC International telling him about a suitable job in Japan, he thought it was a scam and did not respond.
“I keep getting e-mail messages promising jobs in Australia and America,” he told ST. A few days later, he received a follow-up call from NSDC International and after some checks – visiting its website and checking numerous videos online – he was convinced it was not a scam. He then applied for the job offered.
Today, he is among the eight Indian automotive technicians taking a basic-level Japanese language course at the academy, which they must pass before they can relocate to Japan to repair and maintain vehicles such as buses and cars for their Japanese recruiters.
Automobile technician Umang Khalasi (extreme right), 24, is taking a basic-level Japanese language course at the academy. PHOTO: THE STRAITS TIMES
“I always dreamt about going to Japan,” said Mr Khalasi, who grew up watching popular Japanese cartoons such as Ninja Hattori-kun and Doraemon. The promised monthly salary of 206,000 yen – equivalent to nearly four times what he earned in Surat – is a draw, as is the opportunity to work with the latest Japanese automotive technology.
Overseas job placements through the government-backed academy – seen as a safe international migration pathway – is also a big assurance for jobseekers. In recent years, hundreds of Indians looking for jobs abroad have been deceived by agents in employment scams. Some of them ended up being forced to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine or were trapped in scam call centres in Myanmar and Cambodia.
Still, Indians working overseas may encounter untoward risk.
In Israel in March 2024, an Indian farm labourer was killed and two others injured in a missile attack by Hamas-aligned Hezbollah.
While they had not been recruited via NSDC International, this incident heightened concerns over the deployment of Indian workers in volatile conflict zones.
The agency has sent more than 6,500 Indian migrant workers to Israel to take up construction and caregiving roles, filling up a void left after Israel deported thousands of Palestinian workers following Hamas’ attack in October 2023.
Mr Kumar, the agency’s CEO, said that none of the workers recruited through his agency had been posted “in any of the disturbed areas”, adding that it was a primary requirement in NSDC International’s labour agreements with Israel.
The Israeli job scheme also threw up initial problems such as a “glaring skill mismatch” resulting from “an over-promised and under-delivered assessment process”, The Indian Express newspaper reported in September 2024. Qualified construction workers said they had ended up working as low-skilled labourers.
Dr S. Irudaya Rajan, chairman of the International Institute for Migration and Development, told ST that the government’s focus should not be just on skills training but also on wider engagements with other countries that provide a safe working space for Indian workers.
“While India should continue to produce skills that match the demand of (recruiting) countries, it should also work with their governments and private entities to rope them in so that they can train our workers here and take them to their countries (with job offers),” he added.
- Debarshi Dasgupta is The Straits Times’ India correspondent covering the country and other parts of South Asia.