Without the training, Saleem would have ended up cleaning the homes of the rich, as her mother does. Her father, an auto rickshaw driver, couldn't afford to educate her beyond school. Her life has taken a different trajectory thanks to her vocational training, training that India desperately needs. In India, millions of young people are unable to find a job while employers struggle to find qualified candidates. What was being promoted by local policymakers a few years ago as India's ''demographic dividend'' - the fact that more than half of its population of 1.2 billion is younger than 25 - is not delivering the sort of bounty that had been anticipated. As a result businessmen, frustrated at being unable to get skilled workers, turn increasingly to automation - a disaster for a country that needs jobs for the unemployed youth flooding the market. What the government failed to realise years ago was that to secure jobs and become productive, young Indians need both education and vocational skills. Of the 1 million young Indians who enter the workforce every month - which will continue for the next two decades - many have neither. India produces about 5 million university graduates every year but when they finish their studies and present at job interviews, employers find they cannot communicate effectively in English, write a short email without grammatical mistakes and fail to show even basic comprehension skills.

Consequently, physics graduates end up answering phones in call centres or working as bus drivers or security guards. Less than half of these graduates are ''employable'' or have the necessary skills to work in industry, according to a report published in June by Aspiring Minds, an employability solutions company based outside Delhi. Indeed, according to the 2011 Talent Shortage Survey by the human resources firm Manpower, nearly 70 per cent of Indian employers had trouble hiring staff. Its survey found that nearly 47 per cent of graduates were not employable in any sector, given their insufficient English language and analytical skills. The culprit, it found, is the traditional teaching method of rote learning, which is still the norm throughout the education system. Cultural preferences are also to blame for the sea of unemployable graduates. R.K. Somany, managing director of of Hindware, a major sanitary ware company, says: ''Parents, even from rural backgrounds, think a university degree is a must even though most engineering colleges have obsolete curriculums and poor faculty. They don't realise that skills training would be much more useful.''

While India liberalised its economy in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its education system. Academic courses are misaligned with the needs of the marketplace, and turn out students who are good at memorising information but poor on critical thinking and comprehension. The larger companies such as Hindustan Unilever and Tata cope with the shortage by running what are essentially in-house universities for preparing new recruits. Tata's special campus in south India trains around 9000 recruits at a time, for an average of 10 weeks. Until recently, the government had long neglected vocational training. Millions of Indians leave school without having undergone any practical, hands-on training to become plumbers, electricians, clerks, tailors or shop assistants. With no skills, they fail to find work. Belatedly, the government has realised it is sitting on a time bomb. If it fails to harness their energy - not to mention the rising aspirations borne of rapid economic growth - they could become a restive and angry force capable of exploding. According to government estimates, 500 million young people must be trained by 2022. To help achieve this, the government's National Skills Development Corporation, set up in 2009, funds training centres and acts as a go-between with industry.

It is effectively training youths on a war footing. Its target is to give vocational skills to 500 million Indians by 2022. Private companies are pitching in, too. Making up for lost time will be difficult. The World Bank estimates that India's training institutes serve only about 7 per cent of students who need vocational skills. Experts estimate that India has only 11,000 vocational training schools, compared with China's 500,000. For every Saleem, there are millions of others like her who need to make the same leap to escape poverty. It's no exaggeration to say that her first day at work in a mall will be historic. Saleem's parents have never been inside a mall. Yet their daughter is set to work in a mall, smashing a class and psychological barrier. ''When I have settled into the job, I want them to come and see me at work, and see a mall for the first time in their lives,'' she says.

F or Saleem, the IL&FS skills training centre itself was something she had never seen before. It looks like a corporate office. Clean, brightly lit, and well-equipped, it hums with activity - welding, carpentry, electrical work, leather work, textiles, mobile phone and computer repairs, accountancy, airconditioner and fridge repairs and hospitality training. The training centre replicates real work conditions. A room on the top floor has been transformed into a five-star bedroom so that students can learn how to tidy up and clean the kind of bedrooms and bathrooms they have only seen in advertisements. And in the room where students are taught about electrical circuitry, there is a model of a nuclear power plant in the middle. ''That's not for training purposes, of course. That's there to inspire them to aim high, not just to repair plugs,'' says Pooja Gianchandani from IL&FS. She believes passionately in the power of vocational training. ''Education, employability and employment are the three essential things for Indians to escape poverty,'' she says.

Some of the students at the centre are not from poor backgrounds but nonetheless have chosen vocational training above a traditional college or university. Other trainees are from poor backgrounds who dropped out of school at some stage and may have only minimal education. Dropouts are trained to become ''bed'' assistants in hospitals. In every classroom, they are hungry for knowledge. Their goal is to escape poverty for a better life. ''My parents have invested their savings on my education. I have to get a job to prove that it hasn't been wasted,'' says Dhayia. He knows that finding a job in India is a Sisyphean task. When the State Bank of India advertised 1500 vacancies in March, it received 1.7 million applications. This deluge was comparatively manageable compared with receiving 3.4 million applications for 11,000 junior vacancies in 2009. The difficulty of getting a job is what prompted Pavan Kumar, 20, to choose the retail training course at IL&FS. ''There are malls all around. I reckoned there must be jobs available in them. I have to earn money to help my father. He is a tailor and his monthly income of 6000 rupees [$100] isn't enough,'' he says.

Kumar likes the practical training he has received, from how to display clothes to launching a charm offensive to placate irate customers (''say sorry, keep smiling and offer an alternative'', he says, grinning). The students also receive training on how to do well in job interviews. Kumar is waiting to hear if his recent interview with a store inside a mall was successful. If he is successful, he will join the 225,000 people that IL&FS has trained since 2007. By 2017, it plans to have trained 4 million young people. One of the centre's strongest backers is the highly successful garment exporter Vinish Jain, who supplies retail chains around the world. He offers his expertise to the centre because he is disappointed by the quality of applicants for jobs with his company. ''They have only theoretical knowledge and are unable to perform the simplest task. Universities have never bothered to link up with industry so that the latter's needs can be incorporated into the curriculum. I could increase my exports by 30 per cent if I could get the staff,'' he says.

Jain says skills training is India's biggest challenge. ''Even if you offer it, it's very hard for the poor to take it up. One day without an income is hell. Three months is unthinkable. Many cannot afford the bus fare to get to a training centre. But if you tell them a job is guaranteed, that gives them the courage to take it up.'' Thanks to IL&FS's links with 1000 companies, its placement rate so far has been about 85 per cent. But employment is another area where India's policies have failed. Unlike China, India's boom was mainly jobless, at least in the later years. During 1999-2003, about 60 million jobs were created, and from 2004-05 to 2012, there were 53 million new jobs (these government figures are disputed by many experts who say the real figure is much lower). During China's recent boom years about 130 million jobs were created. In 2012 alone, China created 12.7 million new jobs. In the first half of 2013, it added 7.25 million jobs. Now, with Indian economic growth slowing down to about 4.5 to 5 per cent a year - half that of the peak years - there is not much hope for job creation. Yet the number of people of working age (between 15 and 64) will grow by more than 120 million in the next decade.

Some of them will be at school or in higher education; some will be women who will marry and stay at home. Nonetheless, a large chunk of the 120 million will be looking for jobs that won't exist, even if they have highly developed skills. ''China's growth was powered by a manufacturing expansion. India's growth was driven by services and IT. Manufacturing is stagnant, says political commentator Satish Jacob. ''Indian businessmen quail at the idea of setting up a new factory. They prefer to expand abroad.'' Unless jobs are created and unless young people gain the skills to do those jobs, experts warn that India's ''demographic dividend'' could turn into a ''demographic disaster'' as potentially tens of millions of unemployed youths turn against a society that gave them new aspirations but no way of fulfilling them. Amrit Dhillon is a Delhi-based journalist.