Logistics Tech Is Creating Careers No Indian University Teaches

I spent about two hours on a Tuesday afternoon last month going through every IIM and IIT website I could find, looking for a single program that teaches fleet telematics, and I found exactly zero.

IIM Mumbai has a Centre of Excellence in Logistics and Supply Chain Management that launched a data driven supply chain certification in 2024, IIT Delhi runs a certificate course through its management studies department, XLRI Jamshedpur partnered with Rutgers in the US for a double masters in logistics and analytics, and Symbiosis has an MBA in operations and supply chain at SIBM Pune, but not one of these programs spends any meaningful time on the technology that's actually running Indian logistics right now.

A fleet management specialist at gpswox.com made the same observation when I brought it up, he said the universities are still teaching supply chain theory from 2015 while the companies hiring their graduates need people who can configure AIS 140 compliance dashboards, build routing algorithms for ten minute delivery windows, and pull GPS telemetry into ERP systems, and he's right, because I looked at the syllabi and there's a lot of procurement strategy and inventory optimization and almost nothing about the platforms these graduates will actually sit in front of on day one.

The numbers tell you something is badly wrong. India's logistics sector employs roughly 22 million people right now and needs to get to about 28 million by the end of the decade, so that's 6 million new bodies in maybe five or six years, and out of those 22 million already working in the field, only about 4.7% are formally skilled according to the Logistics Sector Skill Council.

Four point seven percent. Naukri.com had something like 86000 telematics related job openings listed as of late 2025, and LinkedIn India was showing another 335 specifically tagged as telematics roles, and when you start adding in the adjacent titles like fleet analytics manager or dispatch optimization engineer, or last mile operations lead, the number is much bigger than that.

I talked to a recruiter in Bengaluru who works exclusively with logistics startups, and she told me half her placements come from people with IT backgrounds who taught themselves fleet management on the job, which is a polite way of saying the formal education system isn't producing anyone remotely qualified for these positions.

The AIS 140 mandate is the thing that forced this conversation into the open. When ARAI made real time GPS tracking mandatory and 3.5 million commercial vehicles got fitted with telematics hardware, somebody had to manage all that data, somebody had to build the dashboards, somebody had to make sure the compliance reports were generated correctly, and the industry looked around and realized there was nobody trained for any of it.

The government's own driver training programs managed to certify about 47000 new commercial drivers in 2024 against a target of 100000, which is a 53% shortfall, and those are just drivers, not the engineers and analysts, and platform managers who sit behind the technology.

Ravikanth Yamarthy from the Logistics Sector Skill Council stood up at LogiMAT India in February 2026 and said it plainly, we need major skilling reforms and digital workforce creation, and when the head of the government's own skilling body says that at a trade show, I think it's fair to say the system has acknowledged the problem without actually fixing it.

Look at the companies doing the hiring, and the gap becomes absurd. Delhivery runs 24 automated sort centres and handles something like 2.5 million shipments a day across 18500 plus pin codes with 57000 employees, and their tech stack involves automated routing, real time fleet tracking, predictive analytics for package volumes, and warehouse automation that requires a level of systems integration most supply chain MBA programs don't even mention in passing.

Shadowfax was running a Data Warriors hiring challenge in 2025, specifically targeting fresh graduates for analytics roles at 6.5 to 8 lakhs per annum, and the fact that they had to brand it as a challenge and recruit through competitions tells you the normal campus recruitment pipeline wasn't giving them what they needed.

Zypp Electric is scaling to 15000 plus EVs for last mile delivery and needs people who understand battery management systems and electric vehicle telematics alongside traditional fleet operations, and good luck finding that combination in any Indian university's placement brochure.

I keep hearing about new job titles that didn't exist three or four years ago. Autonomous fleet supervisor, drone operations lead, urban logistics coordinator, dispatch algorithm engineer. Shiprocket has over 50 active job openings and serves 250000 sellers doing 2.5 billion dollars in annual GMV, and when I looked at their careers page, most of the technical logistics roles required skills in API integration, real time data pipelines, and machine learning for demand forecasting, none of which show up in a traditional logistics curriculum.

The India fleet management software market alone was doing 69.8% of its revenue through cloud and SaaS platforms in 2024, growing at about 13.9% a year, so we're talking about an industry that runs on software and the people it needs are basically software engineers who happen to understand trucks, or truck people who happen to understand software, and Indian universities have not figured out how to produce either one at any kind of scale.

The NSDC set up a Logistics Sector Skill Council years ago, and they've developed national occupational standards that are NSQF aligned and all of that, but when you actually look at what they offer, it's mostly warehouse operations and freight handling certifications, not the fleet technology and data analytics layer where the real hiring pressure sits.

Alpana Chaturvedi from MyLogistics Gurukul made a point that stuck with me, she said the goal should be to make candidates deployable from day one and not just employable, and that distinction matters because every logistics company I've talked to says the same thing, graduates show up knowing the theory of supply chain management but needing six months of on the job training before they can actually use the platforms that run the business.

India moved up to 38th in the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index in 2023, six places better than where it was in 2018, and BCG is projecting rapid commerce alone to become a 20 billion dollar GMV opportunity by 2030, and Mercer found that 71% of Indian companies already struggle to hire the right talent on time and at reasonable cost.

The fleet management side of this is growing at maybe 13 to 14% a year, the gig delivery workforce crossed 12 million, and somewhere in all of this a 21 year old in Hyderabad or Pune is going to graduate with an MBA in supply chain management and walk into an interview at a logistics company where nobody cares about his coursework on procurement lifecycle theory and everyone wants to know if he can read a Grafana dashboard, configure geofencing alerts, or write a SQL query against a live telematics database. I've met that kid. He figures it out eventually, but he shouldn't have to teach himself the thing his degree was supposed to cover.