– Gaurav Dhingra, & Dr Soumya Sahadevan
India stands at a critical juncture in its economic and workforce development. As the country advances towards its vision of becoming a developed economy by 2047, its demographic advantage, a young and expanding workforce, remains a central pillar of this ambition. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (Jan 2026), India’s Labour Force Participation Rate stands at 55.9%, with a Worker Population Ratio of 56.2% and an unemployment rate of 5%.
While these indicators suggest steady workforce engagement, there remains a deeper challenge: the growing mismatch between industry demand and workforce skills. Among the emerging employment-intensive sectors, the bakery industry has gained prominence within India’s food processing ecosystem. Valued at USD 13.8 billion in 2024 and projected to reach USD 31.5 billion by 2033, the sector’s rapid growth is driven by changing consumption patterns, urbanisation in Tier2 and Tier-3 cities, and increasing demand for convenience bakery products. The food production sector accounts for 11.6% of total workforce engagement, with bakery and confectionery alone contributing over 36% of workforce demand within this segment (Reference Annual Survey of Industries 2023–24). Despite this scale and urbanisation momentum, the sector continues to face a severe shortage of skilled manpower.
Aligning Academia with Industry:
The Road to Workforce Readiness India’s higher education ecosystem has expanded significantly over the past two decades, now comprising over 45,000 colleges and more than 1,100 universities. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 further aims to raise the Gross Enrolment Ratio to 50% by 2035, underscoring the government’s focus on access, quality, and research. However, this expansion has been uneven across disciplines. Hospitality graduates represent only 0.05% of total student enrolment, while culinary institutes form merely 0.2% of the education landscape, with just 161 institutes nationwide, most of them privately run (AISHE 2021–22).
This underrepresentation reflects the limited academic visibility of bakery and culinary education in mainstream higher education. The skill deficit extends beyond formal education. Data from the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (2024) indicates that only 2.3% of India’s workforce has undergone formal skill training. As demand for skilled labour accelerates toward 2026, this gap between educational attainment and jobready skills is expected to widen further. Industry-led initiatives offer valuable insights into addressing this gap. Established in 1962, Defence Bakery recognised the skills shortage in the bakery sector decades before it became an industry-wide concern.
With an integrated retail network of eight outlets and a solid B2B business foundation, the Organisation has implemented structured in-house training programs under the leadership of Director Mr Tushar Dhingra. These programs focus on hands-on skill development, independent of formal educational qualifications. Over 150 trainees have been trained through this model, with many absorbed internally and others placed across leading bakeries and hospitality chains nationwide and worldwide. In bakery and food processing, challenges such as inadequate training capacity, limited R&D investment, evolving food safety requirements, and underdeveloped testing infrastructure continue to constrain productivity and innovation.
However, these gaps also create a strong platform for organised players to invest in capability building, strengthen compliance frameworks, enhance quality benchmarks, and drive sustainable skill development initiatives. To sustainably address the workforce crisis, the bakery industry requires coordinated policy intervention. Curriculum alignment, strengthened vocational and short-term certification programs, industry-academia collaboration, and targeted government investment in skilling and capacity building are essential. Such measures will be critical in creating a skilled, future-ready workforce capable of supporting India’s rapidly expanding bakery industry and broader food processing sector.
(The authors are Gaurav Dhingra, Director & Dr Soumya Sahadevan, Head TA & Acting Head HR, Defence Bakery Private Limited. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Kitchen Herald or any properties of IMAWS.)
