India’s economic trajectory has seen an impressive run over the last few decades, but concerns are rising over the country’s ability to productively engage a large and growing working age population. Recent increases in employment are primarily due to the rise in self-employment, while transition to a skilled labour force has been slow, highlighting the need for creating not just jobs but ‘good’ jobs. Furthermore, the rising capital intensity of production technology necessitates the development of a skilled and productive workforce to increase the share of labour in aggregate value added in the economy. In the race for a US$ 7 trillion economy, India needs to urgently overcome bottlenecks to increasing both the quality and quantity of workforce participation and sectoral labour productivity.