At 6:40 on a Mumbai morning, before the first local train has finished coughing its crowd onto the platform, a man outside the station lights his stove. He has no business plan. He has a number in his head: how many pavs he must sell before the gas cylinder, the potatoes, the daily rent of a few feet of pavement and the unspoken courtesy to whoever looks the other way are all paid for. After that number, the day begins to belong to him.

By 11 a.m., he will have run a supply chain, a pricing experiment, a loyalty programme and a risk assessment. He will have done it without a slide deck, and he will have done it better than most of the case studies I was taught from.

I took my MBA students to stand at his elbow. Not as tourists, the way we visit a factory and nod at machines, but as apprentices. The assignment was plain. Each team received a small seed amount, a patch of pavement and one day. The rule was that no one could call a parent, and no one could lean on a surname. Sell something. Show me the arithmetic by night.

I have taught for years, and I can tell you what a classroom sounds like when it is working and when it is merely polite. This was neither. This was a roomful of young people discovering that confidence is a muscle, and that most of them had never been asked to lift anything.

The first 20 minutes

They froze. A student with a distinction in marketing could not say “ek plate, bees rupaye” to a stranger walking past. A young woman who had topped quantitative methods priced her product the way she answered exams: carefully, correctly, and for nobody. Her tea cost her twelve rupees to make, and she sold it at fourteen, proud of the neat margin, until a woman with a baby on her hip told her, kindly, that the stall across the road gave a biscuit free and charged the same.

That sentence taught more than my semester of pricing theory. Margin is not a number you calculate. It is a conversation you survive.

The pavement answers instantly. A classroom hands you a grade in two weeks, wrapped in a rubric. The street hands you a verdict in 90 seconds, wrapped in a shrug. By noon, the boy who could not speak to strangers was calling out to the lunch crowd with a hoarseness I recognised from every vendor I have ever walked past. By evening his team had made a modest profit, and he was counting coins with the reverence other people reserve for scripture.

I will not pretend the profit mattered. The amounts were small. What mattered was what happened in their faces when the first stranger said yes.

What they carried home?

In the weeks after, I watched the change settle into them like silt after a flood, slowly and permanently. Four things stand out.

They stopped fearing rejection. Having been told no forty times in a single afternoon, a campus interview no longer felt like a courtroom. Several told me they walked into their next placement round calmer than they had ever been, because nothing a panel could say would be louder than a hawker’s indifference at 5 p.m.

They learned cash. Not accounting, which they knew, but cash: the cold arithmetic that a business can be profitable on paper and dead by Friday. One team ran out of change by two o’clock and lost an hour of sales hunting for coins. They will never forget what working capital means, because they felt it in their pockets.

They learned to read people. A vendor does not segment a market with a survey. He watches shoes, watches the hour, watches who walks fast and who walks slow. My students started noticing the city the way a photographer notices light.

And they learned that the people we call unskilled are running enterprises of astonishing sophistication. By most estimates India has around a crore street vendor. Since 2020 the PM SVANidhi scheme has tried to lend them working capital, starting at a modest ten thousand rupees, and has reached many lakhs of them. These are people who manage inventory with no software, credit with no bureau and demand with no forecast. When my students understood this, something shifted in how they spoke about the informal economy. The word “informal” stopped meaning “lesser” and started meaning “unfiltered.”

Several of them, months later, started something of their own. A food stall. A resale venture. A small design studio. Not all survived, and that is the point. They had learned that failure is a line item and not an obituary.

The question I could not put down

Somewhere in those weeks, a quieter question began to follow me home. Why did it take a pavement to teach my students what a business school should have been teaching all along?

Let me be careful, because this is the point where critics of Indian education usually stop being useful. I am not here to sneer at employment-oriented courses. A company is a community. The accountant, the analyst, the operations manager, the HR lead, these are not lesser citizens of the economy. They are its muscle and its memory. An employee who works honestly and well is as much a stakeholder in this country’s future as any founder. Nobody builds a bridge alone.

My argument is about proportion. Walk through the brochure of almost any Indian management programme and count. Count the courses on finance, marketing, operations, human resources. Then count the courses that teach a student how to start from nothing. In many institutions you will find one elective, taught in the final semester, graded by a written exam, as if entrepreneurship were a subject you could pass by memorising its definition.

The entire machinery points one way. Placement cells, campus drives, package announcements, the annual headline about the highest salary offered. The year’s success is measured in how many students were absorbed by somebody else’s company. A student who says “I want to build” is gently asked, by every adult around them, whether they have a backup.

That gentle question is a quiet kind of policy.

The numbers behind the mood

The numbers do not flatter the model. The ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 found that young people make up nearly 83% of India’s unemployed, and that the share of educated youth among the unemployed had climbed from about 54% in 2000 to nearly 66% in 2022. Official labour force surveys have for years shown unemployment among young graduates far above the national average, in the range of close to three in ten. Industry surveys on employability keep returning the same uncomfortable verdict: only around half of our graduates are considered ready for the jobs they are applying for.

We are producing degrees faster than the economy can produce vacancies for them. A system that trains millions to wait in a queue cannot be surprised when the queue gets long.

There is another way to read those figures. Every year, somewhere between a few lakhs and a few million young Indians, depending on whose count you trust, walk out of a campus gate holding a certificate that says they are educated. The country has invested in them, their families have borrowed for them, and they have been taught, through four years of pointed silence, that the only door worth knocking on is a door somebody else built.

Imagine, instead, that some fraction of them had been taught to build the door.

This is not a fantasy. Startup India, launched in January 2016, has now recognised more than 2.23 lakh startups, according to the government’s own figures as of 31 March 2026. Those startups report over 23 lakh direct jobs. Last financial year alone, a record 55,200 entities were recognised, and Maharashtra leads the list with more than 38,000. Behind every one of those numbers is a person who decided, against the advice of a well-meaning relative, to build.

That is the proof of concept. The question is why it must happen despite our education system rather than because of it.

Three friends, three counters

I have friends who built. I will not name them here, because some are still fighting their battles and I would not like to hand an inspector a headline. But I will tell you what they went through, because their stories are the footnotes this country does not print.

The first, a friend in Pune, opened a small food business with the optimism of someone who had cooked for every family gathering for fifteen years. The cooking took three weeks. The paperwork took the best part of a season. An FSSAI licence, a shops and establishment registration, a GST number, a trade licence from the municipal body, a fire clearance that nobody could tell her whether she needed. Each counter wanted the previous counter’s paper. Each paper had a validity that expired before the next one arrived. She told me she spent more hours standing in queues than standing at her stove.

The second, a friend building in agriculture technology, did everything the brochure told him to do. He registered as a private limited company, applied for DPIIT recognition, and went looking for money through the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme. He learned that the scheme, with a corpus of about 945 crore rupees, does not hand money to founders directly. It routes it through incubators approved by the government. The incubator needs to select him. The incubator has a limited cohort. His idea was too early for some, too physical for others, and too regional for the rest. He told me the scheme felt like a lighthouse seen through fog: you can see it; you cannot reach it.

The third, a friend who tried the credit route, went to the bank armed with MUDRA. The scheme, launched in 2015, has sanctioned a staggering number of loans, over 50 crores by recent counts, almost all of them small. The rules say loans up to ten lakh rupees under MUDRA require no collateral. My friend was asked for a guarantor, a property paper and a cousin’s signature. When she quoted the rule, the officer smiled the smile of a man who has quoted the rule himself and watched it lose. She also looked at the Stand-Up India scheme, meant for women and for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe entrepreneurs, offering loans between ten lakh and one crore for a first venture. The file went from branch to branch for months. She eventually funded the business with her savings and a loan from her father.

None of these friends were cheated. None were refused outright. They were simply tired by process, one signature at a time, until the energy they had meant to spend on customers had been spent on counters.

There is a word for this. It is friction. Friction is invisible in a policy document and unmistakable in a founder’s life.

I should be fair here. Recognised startups can self-certify compliance under several labour and environmental laws. The angel tax, which once hung over early-stage investors like a bad rumour, was removed in the 2024 Budget. Recognition itself costs nothing. These are real reforms, and the people who pushed them through deserve credit. But reforms written in Delhi arrive in a branch office in Satara or a municipal ward in Kolhapur at a walk, not a sprint. And most of the reforms are designed for the polished, funded, DPIIT-recognised startup. The woman who wants to run a tiffin service, the young man who wants to repair phones, the cooperative of three friends who want to sell handloom online, they are rarely the ones in the brochure.

A fund that cannot be reached

There is one more number worth sitting with. The Fund of Funds for Startups, managed through SIDBI, has been a flagship effort since 2016. It does not invest in founders. It invests in venture funds, which then invest in startups. As of 31 March 2026, the scheme had supported 153 funds, and those funds had backed about 1,270 startups. A second round, with a corpus of 10,000 crore rupees, was notified in April 2026.

Now hold two numbers next to each other. Over 2.23 lakh recognised startups. About 1,270 touched by that fund. That is roughly half of one percent.

I do not say this to belittle the fund. Venture capital is a narrow river by design; it is meant for companies that can grow tenfold, not for every honest small business. But a country that tells its young people to become job creators must also ask what lies between the pavement vendor’s ten thousand rupees and the venture fund’s ten crore. That middle is where most real enterprises live, and where too many of them die.

What would I ask for?

I am a teacher, not a minister, so I will ask for things a teacher can ask for.

Make entrepreneurship a spine, not a spice. Every management and commerce programme should have at least a full year of practice-based entrepreneurship, not a single elective. Real ventures, real customers, real money, however small. Grade the learning, not the profit.

Put an incubator inside every serious campus. The Atal Innovation Mission has seeded Atal Tinkering Labs in thousands of schools and a network of Atal Incubation Centres in institutions. That is a start. But a campus with fifty thousand students and no functioning incubator is a university that has built a library without books. Incubators should not be a signboard at the entrance. They should have a budget, a mentor roster and a student who is allowed to fail inside them.

Bring mentors who have bled. Our faculties are rich with scholars and thin with founders. Let the vegetable wholesaler, the garment exporter, the failed startup founder and the successful one sit in classrooms as visiting faculty with real standing. A mentor who has missed a payroll understands a student’s fear more precisely than any textbook.

Fund the small and the early. Seed support, proof-of-concept grants and collateral-free loans must reach the founder directly, or through institutions that are held accountable for how many founders they fund, not how many they enrol. Measure outcomes, not announcements.

Cut the counters. A single-window clearance that behaves like one window. Deemed approvals if an authority does not respond within a stated time. A sunset clause on every licence that has outlived its purpose. Let the first three years of a young venture be spent building, not queueing.

Let universities experiment. Allow institutions to count a student’s venture as credit, to defer placement for those who wish to build, and to hold equity in student ventures. Ask any founder what the hardest year is. It is the first. Let the university stand beside them in it.

Why I am hopeful

When I think of that vada pav seller, I do not feel pity. I feel something closer to awe, and a little embarrassment. He built an enterprise before the policy was written, before the loan was approved and before anyone invited him to a pitch day. He is, in the most literal sense, the first draft of the India we say we want.

And I think of my students at the edge of that pavement, trembling, then laughing, then counting coins. What I saw in them is the thing no ranking measures. India is young in a way few countries have ever been. Our median age is under thirty. Millions of young people are already carrying phones that hold more computing power than the machines that sent the first astronauts to the moon, and they are hungry in the plain, uncomplicated way of people who have not yet been told what is impossible.

Talent is not our shortage. What we lack is a system that sees talent when it arrives without a permission slip.

So, I ask my colleagues, and myself, to put down the syllabus for a moment. We have spent decades measuring how much we covered. Let us start measuring how much our students can do. Can they sell? Can they build? Can they fail on a Tuesday and open again on Wednesday? Can they hire someone, and keep that someone fed?

A syllabus finishes. A skill keeps going.

The man outside the station will light his stove again tomorrow at 6:40 a.m. The train will arrive. The crowd will pour out, hungry and in a hurry. Some of them will be graduates carrying a degree and a doubt. If we do our job, a few of them will stop, look at him, and think I could do this too, and better, and with ten people working beside me.

That thought is the beginning of a job. It is also the beginning of a country.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

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