– Azhaan Merchant, CEO & Co-Founder, Bharat Intelligence

Ask most people to name a skilled blue-collar worker, and they will say plumber, electrician, or welder. Nobody says grape pruner, bud injector, or sugarcane harvester. Yet a farmer needing thinning work on a vineyard at exactly the right stage cannot rely on just any agricultural worker. The job requires a specific skill, at a specific time, in a specific crop context—and no formal system in India trains workers for it. If executed poorly, an entire season’s harvest, and a farmer’s income, can be at stake.

That is the core problem. Agricultural labour employs over 140 million people and underpins a horticulture sector that accounts for more than 30 per cent of India’s agricultural GDP. Yet the skilling infrastructure built around it treats the sector as a homogeneous, generic category. There is no standardised curriculum, no occupational identity, no proof of work, and no certification pathway.

Workers who perform high-value, time-sensitive operations every season have no way to demonstrate what they know. Farmers who depend on skilled execution during narrow crop windows cannot access reliable, trained labour. The market fails on both sides, and India’s ambitions to become a premium exporter of fruits and vegetables are held back by the absence of standardisation at the field level.

Why generic frameworks do not work

India’s skilling architecture was designed with factory floors and classroom settings in mind: fixed locations, stable cohorts, linear curricula, and predictable pipelines. Agricultural labour fits none of these.

The workforce is mobile and seasonal. The “classroom” is a vineyard in Nashik or a banana plantation in Solapur. The curriculum must be tied to a specific crop and a specific window in the agricultural calendar. A worker trained in grape harvesting in February needs entirely different knowledge from one handling bunch management in October. Grape cultivation alone involves more than 15 distinct activities—pruning, dipping, thinning, cane tying, and paper wrapping—each requiring its own technique to be executed correctly.

With demand fragmented across hundreds of thousands of small farmers and no single enterprise to lobby for frameworks or budgets, nothing meaningful has been built to address this gap. We are facing the worst agricultural labour crisis since Independence. It is the number one problem farmers raise and the primary reason many have not shifted towards higher-value horticultural crops.

What an agricultural skilling framework actually requires

The design logic must be inverted. Start with real farm demand. Build backwards.

Three principles matter most.

Operation-specificity over broad coverage. A worker trained deeply in one activity—for example, banana fruit care—is more immediately deployable than one trained superficially across multiple crops. Expertise density beats breadth. It is also more meaningful to the farmer, who can specify exactly what skill they need.

Field-based learning over classroom instruction. The environment in which a skill is assessed must be the same environment in which it will be performed. Briefing workers on crop anatomy, demonstrating the activity alongside an agronomist, pairing them with experienced crews, and then assessing them in the field—this is how agricultural skill transfer actually works. A presentation cannot substitute for it.

Proof of work embedded from day one. Agricultural workers carry no résumé, no employment record, and no verifiable audit trail of capability. Every training programme should produce a record of what the worker was trained in, how they were evaluated, where they were deployed, and how they performed. Built over multiple seasons, that record transforms agricultural labour from an informal daily-wage activity into a recognised economic asset that workers can carry across employers and geographies.

What the field tells us

At Phala, we run a two-day, field-based training model in Maharashtra, sourcing workers from labour-surplus tribal belts in Nandurbar and Melghat.

On Day 1, workers receive a crop anatomy briefing and undertake supervised observation. On Day 2, they participate in paired fieldwork alongside skilled crews, followed by a formal assessment covering technical skills, attitude, and discipline. Those who pass receive certification. We pay workers for both days because their earnings cannot stop. By Day 3, our trained cohort is deployed into active crews, delivering work quality that meets operational standards, with productivity roughly 25 per cent below that of fully experienced workers.

For workers who previously had no reliable income, this creates a genuine livelihood opportunity. For farmers, it adds trained labour to a system that has been running on empty.

The constraint is not aptitude. It is access.

The broader implication

India cannot build a resilient agricultural economy on an unorganised workforce. Organised, trained, demand-matched labour is as fundamental to agricultural productivity as better seeds, water, or market access. We invest heavily in all of those. We have barely begun investing in the workforce.

What is needed is not more generic skilling. It is a framework purpose-built for agriculture: crop-specific, calendar-anchored, field-based, and built around proof of work. The institutions and policymakers shaping India’s skilling ecosystem have both the opportunity and the obligation to close this gap.

The workers already have the capability. The system simply needs to recognise it.

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