Dell Technologies launches uDaan to skill 23,000 youth for India’s AI and electronics manufacturing economy
National public-private consortium will work with 190 government and aided institutions across five technology corridors
On September 3, 2026, Dell Technologies launched uDaan: Empowering India’s Future Workforce, a national skilling and innovation programme designed to prepare 23,000 young people for careers in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and electronics manufacturing.
The programme will be carried out by a consortium made up of FITT-IIT Delhi, the Learning Links Foundation and the Generation India Foundation and will run at 100 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and 90 Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in the five technology corridors: Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune.
The programme will be concerned with linking training to employment and with apprenticeships and entrepreneurship. Dell stated that connections with employers will be incorporated into the programme in order to set up structured routes from education onto jobs and apprenticeships.
FITT-IIT Delhi will design and certify four curricula that are aligned with industry requirements, covering the areas of AI Application Development, Cloud Development, Assembly Line Operations and Field Technician positions. These curricula have been jointly validated by over 40 employers coming from the fields of technology, electronics manufacturing, Global Capability Centres and hyperscalers.
The Learning Links Foundation will be in charge of carrying out the delivery at the higher education institutions and will provide support with regard to the onboarding of the institutions, while the Generation India Foundation will look after the implementation at the ITIs and the establishment of employment linkages.
Manish Gupta, who is the President and Managing Director of Dell Technologies India, stated that the AI economy in India is generating job opportunities faster than employers can fill them, with these jobs calling for new kinds of skills. uDaan is the initiative that Dell is undertaking to create large-scale pathways linking education with employment, in cooperation with institutions which serve millions of young Indians; we believe that skilling is a vital enabler of AI adoption, workforce readiness and long-term innovation and economic viability.
Measuring employment outcomes
According to Dell, unlike other programmes which mainly monitor enrolment and course completion, uDaan will look at employment and retention at three, six, twelve and twenty-four months after placement.
The programme will offer apprenticeship routes via the government’s National Apprenticeship Training Scheme (NATS) and National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS) websites for those participants who do not go directly into employment.
The employees of Dell will spend more than 2,000 hours on mentoring in the five corridors, the subject matter including career advice, awareness of AI and preparation for interviews.
The programme also includes entrepreneurship. In the first year it will aim to support 25 deep-tech startups among the learners at the higher education institutes and 10 micro-enterprises among those at the ITIs. The participants will have access to the innovation ecosystem of FITT-IIT Delhi, to technical mentoring and to physical bootcamps, as well as to links with accelerator networks and possible sources of capital.
Designed for replication
uDaan is in accord with Skill India 2.0, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, Make in India and Digital India; Dell has designed the programme as a replicable model of public-private partnership, involving officials from the state’s Directorate of Vocational Education and Training (DVET) and Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) right from the first year.
The programme intends to explain its method in order that state governments and other companies may take on various aspects of the model. Dell’s longer-term aim is to set up uDaan as a model for linking together industry demand, institutional capacity and workforce development.
This launch is based upon Dell Technologies’ previous efforts in the field of education and digital skills in India, and in the last ten years the company states that its community programmes have provided more than 50 million K-12 learners with basic and vocational skills.
Dell has likewise collaborated with the Atal Innovation Mission and the NITI Aayog on the Student Entrepreneurship Programme 2.0, providing support to young innovators from the Atal Tinkering Labs.
Dell is also continuing its support of digital access and digital skills via the Solar Community Hubs programme. The programme has reached 2.67 million beneficiaries in 18 districts and in 14 states in India since the financial year 2023, the company states. In June 2026 Dell announced five more hubs at 50 institutions, which increased its global network of hubs to 63 across 12 countries.
