Mumbai / Ranchi
In a State Cabinet meeting at Mantralaya on Tuesday, Maharashtra Chief Minister Shri Devendra Fadnavis unveiled the Impact Book of the country’s first AI-powered skill census, a ward-level exercise in Mumbai that its architects say is designed to be lifted and adapted by any Indian state that decides to know its own workforce, name by name.
The exercise, called Saksham Skill Census, was carried out in the H-West Ward of Mumbai Suburban District, covering Bandra West, Santacruz West and Khar West. Over six months, an artificial intelligence voice agent conversing in Hindi, Marathi and English, working alongside field teams on the ground, surveyed households, employers and training institutes door to door. 59,000+ households were covered. 44,000+ young people were personally profiled. 37,000+ have already been placed on a skilling-based livelihood pathway. 1,018 employers and 54 training institutes are already linked in.
The scale of what a single ward has produced is the finding that has drawn attention in policy circles across India. Mumbai Suburban District’s earlier annual target for skilling and employment stood at 800 to 1,000 candidates. Saksham has generated a live pipeline more than twenty times that number, from one ward alone.
Why Jharkhand should be watching.
For a state whose youth have for decades gone west to Mumbai and south to Bengaluru and Chennai for work, and whose Chief Minister Shri Hemant Soren has repeatedly placed the dignity and safety of Jharkhand’s migrant workers at the centre of his government’s agenda, what Saksham has quietly done matters. It has profiled residents individually, including those who came to Mumbai for work, and matched them to specific employers and training institutes on a single verified database. The same method, its designers say, is ready to be run inside any district, from Ranchi to Dumka to Sahibganj to Palamu, to know the young people in that district by name, know the work they can already do, and know the work they want to do.
“The census has helped identify women homemakers with digital readiness and a desire to earn on their own terms. Traditionally, this population would have been ignored in any economic survey. Thanks to the census, about 100 women are engaged in providing data for building AI models, and generating dignified income for the first time,” said Ashwin Srivastava, who led the design of the AI system behind the census. It is a finding likely to resonate in Jharkhand’s rural and tribal districts, where women’s participation in the paid workforce remains among the lowest in the country and where opportunities to earn from home have been scarce.
Srivastava, one of the country’s most prominent voices on sovereign AI and its use in public systems, sees the census as a proof of concept for a very different kind of governance. “We divided the ward into micro-territories, created a hyperlocal profile for each, conducted door-to-door surveys using the latest technologies, used AI to derive hidden truths, and generated intelligence to create impact on the ground,” he said. The micro-territory method, he added, is suited as much to the panchayats of Santhal Pargana and Kolhan as it is to the wards of Mumbai.
A pathway, not a survey
The District Collector of Mumbai Suburban District, Shri Saurabh Katiyar, framed the exercise in language that will be familiar to any administrator who has struggled with the gap between data and delivery. “This is not just a census. It is a pathway for livelihood impact for all residents of the ward,” he said.
The Impact Book, produced as a coffee table volume, was presented to the Chief Minister by the Guardian Minister of the district, Shri Ashish Shelar. A similar exercise is now under way in Nagpur District, and the model is being prepared for extension across Maharashtra’s wards. International interest has followed. The Saksham model was presented earlier this year as a case study at Northwestern University in Chicago as a first-of-its-kind sovereign livelihood AI. The model is also being explored for scaling in developing economies in South Asia and Africa, and to open engagement with the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. Case study discussions are under way with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the Indian Institute of Management Mumbai, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, J-PAL South Asia and the Centre for Policy Research.
For Jharkhand, the significance is not in Mumbai’s numbers. It is in what those numbers show is possible when a district decides to know its own people. The model is ready. The question is which state adopts it first.
