Building India@2047 Will Take More Than Concrete and Capital. It Will Take Human Capital

by Ashwani Awasthi, Managing Director, RICS South Asia

India is building at a scale few countries have seen. Metro networks, expressways, airports, industrial corridors, data centres, offices, housing and new urban infrastructure are transforming the physical landscape of the country.

Yet, as India looks towards becoming a developed nation by 2047, one question deserves far greater attention: Who will build, manage and maintain everything we are planning to build?

The answer matters because India’s infrastructure ambition is beginning to run into a less visible constraint: the availability of skilled human capital.

Real estate and construction are among India’s largest employers and make a significant contribution to the economy. But the challenge is no longer simply creating more jobs or producing more graduates. It is developing professionals with the knowledge, judgement and practical skills required to deliver increasingly complex projects.

India can mobilise capital. It can assemble land. It can deploy technology. But the people who turn plans, drawings and investments into buildings and infrastructure that are delivered on time, within budget and to the required standards are harder to produce.

Part of the problem is that the built environment profession itself has changed dramatically. Projects are now planned, designed and managed using technologies that barely featured in classrooms a decade ago. A project manager must understand digital workflows and data. A site professional increasingly needs to work with Building Information Modelling. Sustainability is moving from a corporate aspiration to a fundamental project requirement, creating demand for professionals who can measure carbon, assess performance, manage energy and deliver against increasingly demanding environmental standards.

At the same time, global investors and international developers are becoming increasingly active in India. They bring expectations around governance, transparency, risk, valuation, project controls and professional standards that are increasingly global in nature.

Roles that were once considered supporting functions like quantity surveying, valuation, project management, facilities management, sustainability and cost management are now central to the success of a project.

India produces millions of engineering, management and other graduates every year. Yet employers frequently report a very different reality from what the numbers suggest.

Many graduates enter the workplace with academic knowledge but limited exposure to the practical realities of the profession. A young professional may understand the theory of estimation but struggle to prepare a bill of quantities that can withstand commercial scrutiny. They may understand project management in a classroom but have never had to manage a contractor, resolve a site issue or decided when time and cost are under pressure. This creates a costly transition from qualification to competence. Companies then spend months and sometimes years retraining people before they can take responsibility for critical work.

The real shortage, therefore, is not simply one of headcount. It is a shortage of professionals who can add value from their first week rather than their first year. Closing this gap requires a fundamental shift in the relationship between education and industry.

Curricula designed without meaningful industry input, taught exclusively in classrooms and assessed primarily through examinations will continue to produce graduates who need to learn the practical realities of their profession after they enter the workplace.

The answer is not another memorandum of understanding between a university and a company. It is about deep, sustained integration between education and industry.

Employers should have a stronger role in shaping curricula. Practitioners should be part of teaching. Students should gain meaningful exposure to live projects, internships, apprenticeships and real-world problem solving. Because some of the most important professional skills cannot be learnt from a textbook.

It is the ability to challenge a number that does not look right. To spot when a design will not translate into reality. To recognise where a shortcut could compromise quality. To identify a risk before it becomes a problem. And most importantly, to have the confidence to speak up when something is not right. That is professional judgement and it is built through experience, not examinations alone.

There are lessons from countries that have successfully built strong professional and technical workforces. Germany’s dual vocational system, for example, combines classroom learning with structured workplace experience. The UK’s apprenticeship and professional qualification pathways have similarly created strong connections between education, employment and professional competence. The common principle is simple; Industry is not the customer of the education system. It is a partner in producing talent.

India already has examples of excellent programmes, apprenticeships and industry-academia partnerships. But they remain too fragmented. Given the scale of India’s built-environment ambition, good practice must become mainstream rather than exceptional.

There is another issue that we often overlook, many young people simply do not know what careers the built environment can offer. Ask a school student to name careers in construction and the answer will often begin and end with architect or civil engineer.

But today’s built environment requires a far broader professional ecosystem, quantity surveyors, valuers, project managers, cost managers, planners, sustainability specialists, facilities managers, ESG professionals, data and technology specialists and many others.

If we want to solve a talent shortage ten or fifteen years from now, we cannot wait until students enter university. Young people need to see the built environment not simply as a construction industry, but as a sophisticated, technology-enabled professional sector offering diverse and rewarding careers.

There is also a critical role for professional standards and globally recognised qualifications. As international capital flows increasingly into Indian real estate and infrastructure, investors need confidence that the professionals advising them operate to consistent standards of competence, ethics and accountability.

A professional qualification that carries meaning across markets helps make Indian talent more portable and Indian projects more understandable and investable to global capital. They allow an investor in one country to have confidence in the work of a professional in another. They create a common language across markets. And they help Indian professionals compete not only for opportunities in India, but increasingly for opportunities around the world.

The consequences of a skills gap are rarely visible on a balance sheet as a single line item. They appear as project delays, cost overruns. rework. poor procurement decisions, weak contract management, underperforming buildings, sustainability commitments that are not delivered and maintenance costs that could have been avoided. Eventually, they appear in the competitiveness of the economy itself.

A country that cannot develop enough skilled professionals to deliver its own infrastructure ambition will either have to import expertise at a premium or risk losing its best talent to markets that offer stronger professional pathways.

The danger is that a human-capital deficit does not announce itself as dramatically as a financing deficit. It accumulates quietly, project by project, decision by decision, until the cost becomes impossible to ignore.

None of this can be solved by one institution, one university or one government programme.

India needs industry, academia, professional bodies and government to work together to build a genuine national talent pipeline for the built environment. That means modern curricula, meaningful apprenticeships, stronger industry participation, early career awareness, continuous professional development, technology-enabled learning and most importantly professional standards that are trusted in India and recognised globally.

India’s ambition for 2047 is rightly measured in kilometres of roads, kilometres of metro, millions of homes, new cities, airports, industrial corridors and economic output, but infrastructure does not build itself. Behind every project is a professional making a decision. Behind every building is a team managing risk, cost, quality and performance. Behind every successful city is a workforce with the skills to make it function.

India has demonstrated that it can mobilise concrete and capital at extraordinary scale. The next test is whether it can mobilise human capital at the same scale.

Because ultimately, India@2047 will not be defined only by how much we build. It will be defined by how well we build it and by the people capable of making that happen.