A4G Impact Collaborative · Governance of AI
The Ladder We Are Pulling Up
From disruption to depth.
Priya is 23. She is waiting for a shortlist that will not come.
She is the first person in her family to complete an engineering degree. Her father drove a tempo, her mother stitched garments, and both spent their savings on her B.Tech in Computer Science.
In 2022, India’s top IT firms hired six lakh freshers. In 2025, that number was one lakh twenty thousand (Business Today). Eighty percent of the entry-level door has closed in three years. Roughly 1.5 million engineering graduates like Priya still enter the market every year. The math no longer works.
The routine cognitive work that used to be the first rung of Priya’s professional life is being done by AI at near-zero marginal cost. The rung itself is being pulled up.
India has a five-to-seven year window before multiple graduating cohorts pass through without absorption. This is not a metaphor. It is a planning horizon.
The A4G Impact Collaborative was formed to see this shift clearly, name it accurately, and help the country design its response before the window closes.
What we are seeing
The signals are already in the data. India’s IT/BPM sector employs 5.8 million people and faces a 75% AI-exposure rate according to IMF and ILO estimates. Between 60 and 80 million formal Indian workers sit in the highest-exposure categories today. Graduate unemployment is near 29% while GDP grows at 6–7%. That gap is the signature mark of a structural break.
The industry itself has moved from bench-building to what Business Today describes as just-in-time hiring — smaller cohorts, lateral recruitment, leaner benches. This is not a cyclical hiring pause. It is a new model.
The ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission has invested seriously in compute, foundational models, and elite skilling. It is silent on workforce transition. India today has neither an equivalent of Singapore’s SkillsFuture nor Germany’s Kurzarbeit, and no institutional body tracking AI-driven displacement in real time.
Our angle
A4G is not a technology institute and not a policy shop. We are a small, specific kind of thing. A collective that looks deeply at the economic and sociological shape AI is giving to work, and then guides governments and policymakers on what to build in response.
Our foundational method is patient research combined with convening. We publish thought-leadership work like Charu’s ladder essay. We run the Governance Dialogues podcast with thought partners including Dr Vivienne Ming, Prof Soumitra Dutta (Dean, Saïd Business School, Oxford), Dr Rajiv Kumar (former Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog), Prof Cary Coglianese (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School), Gaurav Rastogi and Dr Shakti Goel. We hold national convenings with government and industry participation.
The Governance work is led by our co-founders Nitin Dhawan and Aarti Ahuja, with Charu Thukral as Research Scholar anchoring the empirical work.
What we are building
Four research priorities we are organising a fellowship programme around.
Real-time tracking of AI-driven job displacement in India. Building the country’s first high-frequency data infrastructure to measure how AI is reshaping formal employment. Combines CMIE-CPHS household surveys, EPFO provident-fund records, and enterprise hiring data. Separates real AI substitution from cyclical slowdowns. This is the empirical foundation the other three priorities build on.
What happens to unabsorbed graduates. A 24-month longitudinal study following engineering graduates from Tier-2 and Tier-3 institutions who did not receive a placement. Tracks where they go — gig work, migration, informal employment, skill decay — and what those trajectories mean for the middle-class social contract.
Income support systems for the transition years. Comparative policy design adapting Singapore’s SkillsFuture (portable training credits) and Germany’s Kurzarbeit (transition subsidies) to Indian fiscal conditions. Includes design work on a National AI Displacement Insurance Fund co-funded from IT-BPM sector revenues.
Higher education after LLMs. Curricular research with Indian universities on what to teach when codified technical knowledge is exactly what AI replicates best. Focus on judgment, cross-domain reasoning, and continuous self-directed learning as the durable human skills for a post-LLM economy.
How the programme runs
We are convening a design workshop this year that brings labour economists, HR institutional leaders, government policymakers, and Indian founders together to draft the first-generation response for India. The workshop is invitation-based and will produce a public design paper.
We are launching an A4G Fellowship Programme to build the research team behind the four priorities. Fellows will be drawn from Indian universities, doctoral programmes, and mid-career institutional practice. Themes for the fellowship draw from our upcoming Intelex essay contest topics and align with the current global research frontier including Anthropic’s five priorities on the economic impact of AI.
Working with us
The five-to-seven year window is real. The design work that shapes India’s response to AI in the labour market must happen now.
We are inviting institutional donors, philanthropic funders, and academic partners into three specific conversations.
Grant partners can request our detailed philanthropy proposal covering the four research priorities, the fellowship programme, and the design workshop. Academic partners can discuss co-authorship, data pipelines, and visiting fellowships. Policy and industry partners can join the pilot data-sharing arrangements underpinning the real-time displacement tracker.