A joint seminar held in Tokyo on 26 May 2025 brought together 250 representatives from leading Japanese companies, academic institutions and workforce mobility stakeholders to advance structured cooperation between India and Japan on skilled labour mobility and human resource development. The event was organised by the Embassy of India in Japan and ASEAN ONE Co. Ltd., Japan, under the aegis of India's Ministry of Labour & Employment.

Key Developments

Toshiaki Nishikawa, Chairman & CEO of ASEAN GROUP Co. Ltd., expressed strong optimism about the bilateral workforce partnership, conveying his enthusiasm for realising a Japan–India personnel exchange programme involving 50,000 people over the next 10 years. The target signals a significant scaling-up of ambitions beyond existing bilateral labour agreements.

Both sides agreed to explore expanding Japanese language and testing centres in India, improving demand visibility from Japan, and building trusted workforce mobility pathways through closer institutional ties — measures that address longstanding bottlenecks in India-to-Japan labour migration.

What India's Government Said

Vandana Gurnani, Secretary, Ministry of Labour & Employment, highlighted India's growing stature as a trusted global workforce partner. She pointed to the country's demographic advantage, robust skilling ecosystem and institutional reforms as key enablers for ethical, scalable international labour mobility.

Gurnani elaborated on India's workforce preparation infrastructure — spanning higher education institutions, industrial training institutes (ITIs), apprenticeship systems, digital skilling platforms and career services — as a foundation for meeting structured demand from economies like Japan. She stressed the urgency of strengthening Japanese language readiness, sector-specific skilling, and ethical recruitment practices.

Sectors in Focus

Participants identified strong bilateral potential across manufacturing, caregiving, construction, automobile maintenance, hospitality, agriculture, IT and digital services, and emerging green economy sectors. The breadth of sectors reflects Japan's acute demographic challenge — an ageing population with a shrinking domestic labour force — and India's surplus of young, trainable workers.

Discussions also underlined the role of digital public infrastructure and employment facilitation systems in creating transparent and scalable mobility pathways, pointing toward technology-enabled matching mechanisms as a future priority.

Why This Matters

India–Japan workforce cooperation has gained momentum in recent years as Japan moves to liberalise its immigration and skilled-worker visa frameworks. This seminar, notably convening 250 industry and institutional stakeholders in one room, signals a shift from government-to-government dialogue toward employer-led demand aggregation — a more durable model for sustained labour mobility. This is among the largest structured engagements between the two countries on workforce issues to date.

With India's working-age population set to remain the world's largest for decades, formalising high-quality outbound pathways — complete with skill recognition and occupational alignment — could generate significant remittance flows and knowledge transfer. The next steps will test whether the ambition of a 50,000-person exchange can be backed by institutional follow-through.