Powering India's National Skilling Platform with a Trusted Learner Registry

A national skill development agency in India partnered with Tekdi Technologies to build the integration backbone of its unified digital skilling platform. The platform brings skilling programmes, training providers, assessments, certification and job opportunities onto a single interface, and connects with a wide range of government and partner systems. Tekdi built the middleware and backend integration layer, with a Sunbird RC-based learner registry at its core, so the platform's applications, core services and external systems work together seamlessly. Today the platform serves over a crore registered learners, helping them discover courses, earn verifiable certificates and find jobs and apprenticeships.

India's skilling ecosystem spans many schemes, training providers, assessment bodies and government systems, each with its own data and processes. Bringing them onto one platform meant every learner's identity, profile and certificates had to stay consistent across every system they touched, at national scale and without slowing down the experience. The agency needed a reliable integration layer to make this possible. Their objectives included:

• Connecting the platform's applications, core services and external government systems through a single integration layer.
• Maintaining one trusted, verified profile for every learner across schemes and services.
• Processing high volumes of profile updates and certificate requests reliably.
• Giving learners verifiable certificates they can access and share with employers.

Tekdi Technologies addressed the challenge by building a microservices-based middleware layer around the Sunbird RC (Registry and Credentials) DPG, an open-source building block for national-scale registries and verifiable credentials. The approach involved:

• DPG Selection: Using Sunbird RC as the learner registry for profile data, supported by Keycloak for identity and access management.
• System Design: Building an adapter layer between the platform's applications, core services, external government systems and the registry, handling API orchestration, data transformation and synchronization.
• Workflow Automation: Using Kafka-based asynchronous processing for operations such as profile updates, photo updates and skill-card generation, with automatic retries and failure handling.
• Integrations: Connecting the platform with national identity eKYC, the national digital document wallet, labour and apprenticeship schemes, vocational training systems and academic ID registries.
• Accessibility: Enabling single registration and login, universal search across jobs, courses, apprenticeships and training centres, and notifications by email, SMS, WhatsApp and push.
• Verifiability: Linking eKYC-verified identities to learner profiles and generating certificates with QR codes that can be verified and shared.

A reusable integration backbone that lets the agency onboard new schemes, partners and government systems through one layer, reducing integration effort.

Learners register once, verify their identity, find courses, jobs and apprenticeships in one search, and receive verifiable certificates they can share for further education and employment.

Sunbird RC DPG, Keycloak, Kafka, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, MongoDB