India Is Building Robots, But Not the Engineers to Run Them

India's robotics and deeptech startups are increasingly looking beyond metro cities to build their workforce, signalling a larger shift in how engineering talent is being sourced and trained. 

Recent workforce studies from EY India suggest companies are prioritising adaptable, trainable talent from Tier 2, 3, and 4 cities amid rising attrition and hiring costs in Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad. 

Studies also show a rise in skill-centric and project-based hiring, reflecting industry demand for practical engineering capabilities over traditional degree credentials.

For deeptech firms, especially those involved in physical AI, hiring from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities has become a competitive advantage, part of a long-term strategy to strengthen workforce retention and rebuild the country's fragmented deeptech talent pipeline. 

The University Pipeline is Not Delivering

The India Decoding Jobs 2026 report, cited by Devashish Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of AI-powered recruitment platform Taggd, notes that 81% of recruiters are struggling to find job-ready candidates. The report also highlights a 53% gap in AI talent and a 90% shortfall in GenAI skills. 

Sumesh Nair, Co-founder of Board Infinity, a career-focused Learning & Development ecosystem, discusses two recent contractions in skills reports with AIM. 

Whilst the India Skills Report 2025 claims engineering graduate employability has nominally reached 71.5%, the Mercer-Mettl India Graduate Skill Index 2025, which assessed over 10 lakh learners across 2,700 campuses, puts the graduate employability at just 42.6%, down from 44.3% in 2023.

Having worked with over a hundred educational institutions, Nair identifies five systemic failures: curriculum lag, a faculty gap, a deficit in an innovative mindset, a mismatch in perceptions between academia and industry, and a weak research-and-innovation pipeline. 

"Colleges teach engineering as a subject, whereas industry requires it as a practical capability," Nair notes. Additionally, he cites a HirePro study that reinforces the point that 70% of academic institutions believe their graduates are job-ready, yet only 16% of companies agree.

Investors Are Watching the Talent Question Closely

For early-stage investors, this talent landscape shapes the investment thesis entirely. Manish Gupta, General Partner at GrowX Ventures, whose portfolio includes space tech companies Pixxel and Bellatrix Aerospace, says the fund's approach to team evaluation is resolutely qualitative. 

"It's very bottom-up. You invest in great founding teams coming up with some significant innovation," Gupta says, adding that the issue is not a talent gap but one of attraction and redirection. "India always had talent that just needs to be pulled out of other roles and attracted to these segments."

He draws a sharper line on which companies are worth backing, distinguishing between IP-led innovation and contract manufacturing. 

"I would rather optimise for owning the IP, rather than just putting things together. That's where we are lacking," he says, pointing to motor controllers for electric vehicles where IP is owned by Chinese or European firms even when assembly happens in India. Gupta views talent and IP as closely connected—without ownership of their stack, companies can't develop engineers capable of innovating on it.

Abhishek Srivatsava, Managing Partner at Kae Capital, echoes this view, calling founder quality the primary signal at the seed stage. "In AI-first opportunities, we index a lot on the ability to do extremely high agile experiments, the ability to carry no baggage, the ability to have a very AI-first view," he says. 

In deeptech and manufacturing, he emphasises domain expertise combined with the ability to translate technology into business outcomes—a combination that universities evidently struggle to produce. 

The Train-and-Deploy Trap

India's robotics sector is expanding rapidly. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), annual industrial robot installations nearly doubled from 4,945 units in 2021 to a record 9,100 units in 2024, with the country now ranking sixth globally for installations. 

Investment in the sector is keeping pace as data from Tracxn cited by The Economic Times (ET) shows robotics startups raised $117 million across 41 deals in 2024, up from $54 million in 2023 and $28.8 million in 2022. 

However, as universities fail to deliver skilled graduates, startups are increasingly training their own talent. 

Anscer Robotics' CBO and Co-founder, Raghu Venkatesh, previously told AIM that, to support their growth, companies are implementing training programs lasting six to eight months for candidates from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. 

Sharma notes that these markets already account for 25% of the workforce, with hiring growing by more than 50% year-on-year. "Emerging cities are no longer auxiliary—they are developing specialised depth," he says.

Yet Nair raises a pointed objection. Training candidates to operate specific proprietary systems produces "highly specialised operators rather than adaptable engineers" whose skills may become obsolete if the company pivots, is acquired, or updates its hardware. 

"The train-and-deploy model provides startups and placement cells with deployable operators and improved statistics, while students secure jobs," he emphasises. "Yet this approach does not cultivate engineers capable of designing and innovating future robotic systems."

Meanwhile, Sharma sees the internal training model as a rational response to market failure. "Companies are training freshers internally because the pace at which deeptech skills are evolving is faster than the pace at which they are available in the market," he says. 

In his view, the model is not inherently flawed. It is the architecture behind it that matters. "Typically, experienced professionals lead system design, while trained freshers contribute to execution and scale."

Rebuilding the Foundation

At the faculty level, semester-long industry immersion programmes are essential. These are more than just annual development events.

At the curriculum level, the shift must be from topic coverage to capability building. Students require exposure to multidisciplinary systems thinking, AI, vision systems, mechatronics, sensor fusion, and human-robot interaction, all integrated into a project-based module, he stresses. 

India currently accounts for 16 % of global AI talent, with projections reaching 1.25 million professionals by 2027, according to The ET. 

Recruiting that talent will depend less on investment announcements and more on what happens inside the institutions that train them.