For Rajesh Chettiar and seven of his friends from Mumbai’s Kandarpada slum in Dahisar, who left for Japan recently, it’s a dramatic change in fortunes. Selected by a visiting delegation from Japan’s Ehime prefecture—seven for maintenance roles and one for welding—the young men underwent four to six months of Japanese language and vocational training at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Atal Bihari Vajpayee Kaushal Vikas Kendra in Kandivali.

The skilling could result in their monthly earnings jumping from the ₹12,000-25,000 typically earned by high-school graduates or ITI-certified workers in India to between ₹80,000 and ₹1.6 lakh.

Their journey reflects a broader shift unfolding across India’s cities as companies, hospitals, gig-economy platforms such as Urban Company and Snabbit, and even recruiters from abroad, are taking young men and women from urban slums, upskilling them to power the retail, logistics, hospitality, healthcare and gig economy. “For decades, our cities have fed the slums, today, the slums are feeding the city’s economy,” points out a senior official at Atal Bihari Vajpayee Kaushalya Vikas Kendra (ABVKVK).

Organisations such as the CII and Nihon Edutech increasingly function as labour-market intermediaries, preparing candidates and matching them with employers in India and abroad. Beyond manufacturing and maintenance, workers are also being prepared for agricultural roles involving seeding, irrigation, harvesting, packaging and farm machinery operations under programmes such as Japan’s Technical Intern Training Programme (TITP) and Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) scheme.

From welfare to workforce

The transformation is being driven as much by employer necessity as social impact. Retailers, restaurant chains, logistics companies, hospitals and gig platforms are grappling with labour shortages, high attrition and rising recruitment costs. Increasingly, they are discovering that some of India’s largest untapped labour pools lie inside low-income urban communities.

CII’s Mumbai-based ABVKVK has mapped 50 slum clusters across the northern part of the city for direct recruitment drives and plans more than 100 job fairs under its Mission 2026 programme. The ABVKVK initiative has facilitated more than 65,000 training and placement outcomes, including over 18,300 women placed in jobs in 2025 alone across telecom, ecommerce, hospitality and quick-service restaurants.

The placement mix mirrors the changing structure of India’s urban economy. Telecom accounts for nearly 25 per cent of placements, followed by ecommerce at 15 per cent. Hospitality, quick-service restaurants, IT and IT-enabled services account for a significant share of the remainder, underscoring the breadth of employer demand emerging from these communities.

Partners such as L’Oréal and Cisco are expanding training capacity across beauty, networking and AI-related roles, helping widen access to formal employment opportunities for first-generation workers.

Instead of offering generic vocational courses disconnected from labour-market demand, programmes increasingly map employer requirements, neighbourhood demographics and recruitment pathways simultaneously—creating a hiring ecosystem that functions closer to a supply chain than a traditional welfare initiative.

The slums feeding India’s labour engine

A similar trend is playing out in Bengaluru, where NGO Hasiru Dala is formalising waste pickers into contractors and micro-entrepreneurs through identity cards, insurance and direct contracts with apartment complexes and technology parks, helping workers move from dependence on middlemen to recognised service providers within the city’s recycling economy.

Mansoor Ahmad, 44, came to Bengaluru as an undocumented migrant and survived as a waste picker until Hasiru Dala helped him secure a BBMP identity card, granting recognition, training and social protection. He later managed the Jayanagar Dry Waste Collection Centre, selling recyclables directly. In 2015, he represented India at COP21 in Paris. Today, he is an operator, radio host and advocate for waste pickers’ rights and dignity while remaining largely invisible earlier.

Pune’s Lighthouse Communities Foundation embeds skilling centres inside low-income communities, targeting first-generation earners entering formal employment in sectors such as retail, healthcare assistance and customer support.

In Hyderabad, programmes run by Dr Reddy’s Foundation and Nirmaan Organisation are supplying workers to hospitals, pharmacy chains, diagnostic centres and IT-enabled services companies. The model addresses a growing mismatch in urban India: sectors such as healthcare and organised retail require large volumes of entry-level workers, while traditional education systems are not producing enough job-ready candidates quickly enough.

Technology platforms are accelerating the shift. Companies such as Snabbit and Urban Company are formalising domestic work, housekeeping, beauty services and last-mile support roles through digital payments, ratings systems and basic insurance coverage, while proximity-based matching helps reduce commuting time and improve retention.

Taken together, these initiatives reveal a deeper shift in how Indian cities are functioning. The urban poor are no longer waiting to enter the organised economy. They are already powering it, sorting waste, staffing restaurants, servicing homes, managing deliveries, supporting hospitals and filling the operational gaps of India’s expanding consumer economy.

Published on June 15, 2026