Future of Work in Transition in India: Key Takeaways from the Future of Jobs Report 2025

Abstract

The nature of work in India is being reshaped simultaneously by artificial intelligence, platform-mediated employment, demographic pressure, climate imperatives and a persistently uneven structural transformation. This article offers a critical narrative review of the academic and institutional literature on the future of work in India, using the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 as an analytical anchor against which recent peer-reviewed scholarship is read and interrogated. The review synthesises evidence on automation theory and generative artificial intelligence, the structural composition of India's labour market, the expansion of gig and platform work, skills formation and reskilling, gender and care work, green transition employment, internal labour migration, and the diffusion of remote and hybrid working arrangements. Across these themes a consistent pattern emerges: India's labour market combines high-skill, technology-intensive growth poles with a vast informal, low-productivity periphery, so that global narratives of net job creation through technological change apply unevenly across the workforce. The review finds that automation risk in India is comparatively high by international standards, that female labour force participation remains a persistent structural anomaly only partially addressed by digital inclusion, that platform work is expanding faster than the regulatory and statistical apparatus designed to govern and measure it, and that vocational education continues to under-serve the scale of skill formation required. The article concludes that policy responses framed solely around the language of the Future of Jobs Report risk overstating the economy-wide applicability of reskilling-led solutions unless paired with deliberate attention to informality, gender exclusion, regional disparity and social protection architecture. The review closes by flagging the methodological and evidentiary gaps that constrain firmer conclusions, particularly the scarcity of longitudinal, India-specific micro-data on platform work and generative artificial intelligence diffusion.