Beyond policy borrowing: a conditional transfer framework for vocational education reform in India

Comparative vocational education and training (VET) scholarship has long sought to derive lessons for India from high-performing international systems, yet decades of policy borrowing have produced limited systemic transformation. This paper argues that this persistent failure is not primarily a problem of implementation but of epistemology: lessons have been borrowed without a theory of transferability. Drawing on Dolowitz and Marsh’s policy transfer framework, Busemeyer and Trampusch’s) collective skill formation typology and Rose’s lesson-drawing approach, this paper constructs a Conditional Transfer Framework (CTF) comprising four transferability filters: state capacity, labour market structure, political economy of skill formation and cultural-aspirational context, developed through a conceptual and documentary analysis rather than primary empirical research. The framework is applied to analyse five VET systems (Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, South Korea and Australia) across four performance dimensions: institutional architecture, industry embeddedness, social legitimacy and systemic permeability. The analysis reveals that India’s deep informality, uneven state capacity and credentialist aspirational economy constitute structural constraints that fundamentally alter what comparative VET learning can achieve. The paper further demonstrates that NEP 2020, while architecturally ambitious, repeats the error of importing formal-economy VET logics into a predominantly informal labour market context. The paper concludes with a theoretically grounded, context-sensitive reform agenda for Indian VET that moves beyond generic policy prescription.