Naukri's JobSpeak index for October 2026 rose 14% to 2,836, and the business desks called it the best October in years. Read function by function, the same report shows two markets: production and manufacturing hiring up 39%, software engineering and quality assurance up just 1% across industries. This post sets the two halves side by side, keeps the Diwali base effect in view, and argues the release is the first hard evidence for the demand-side employment mapping I proposed in my National Employment Grid whitepaper.
Tuesday's business pages carried one number: Naukri's JobSpeak index rose to 2,836 in October 2026 from 2,480 a year earlier, so hiring was up 14% (ET HR World, 3 November 2026).
The average is where I stop reading. Split by function, the month becomes two stories. The splits, from Storyboard18's report of 3 November 2026:
| Function or segment | Growth, Oct 2026 vs Oct 2025 |
|---|---|
| Production and manufacturing, all industries | +39% |
| Automobile sector, overall | +36% |
| Automobile: research and development | +53% |
| Automobile: procurement and supply chain | +50% |
| Automobile: production and manufacturing | +41% |
| Automobile: sales and business development | +7% |
| Software engineering and QA, all industries | +1% |
| IT and software services | +5% |
| Artificial intelligence and machine learning roles | +32% |
| Global Capability Centres | +18% |
Automobile was the strongest sector, and what it hired for matters: the people who design, source and check the vehicle grew several times faster than the people who sell it. FMCG grew 6% overall; its production hiring rose 40%.
The map agrees. Hyderabad led the metros at 15%, but the sharpest growth sat outside them:
- Gandhinagar 48%
- Surat 36%
- Raipur 34%
- Vadodara 30%
- Ranchi 29%
Three of those five are in Gujarat.
Part of the 14% is arithmetic, and the report says so itself: Diwali fell in October 2025, depressing that base. Hitesh Oberoi's reading is narrower — "Manufacturing companies are building capacity, and demand for AI skills remains strong, indicative of the selective, fundamentals-led nature of hiring demand." Nothing in that sentence is festive.
I believe this is what AI-augmented manufacturing looks like on the ground. The factory is hiring the design engineer, the buyer and the quality inspector whom the software services firm has stopped hiring, and hiring them in Surat and Raipur as readily as in Bengaluru. One per cent for software QA is not a collapse. Thirty-nine per cent for production is a redirect.
I have wanted exactly this data for years. In National Employment Grid : a Whitepaper (July 2025) I asked why a country that leapfrogged on UPI and Aadhaar still measures the supply of jobseekers and never the demand for them. Nine years before that I had broken one JobSpeak release into plain tables of function, industry and city, because a single growth figure tells a student nothing about what to learn.
Now that the splits have been shown, what I would suggest to Naukri and Info Edge:
- Publish the full function-by-industry-by-city cross-tab every month as anonymised open data, not a headline plus highlights.
- Route that monthly demand signal to state skilling boards and ITIs in the districts where it is rising first.
- Make it the demand engine of the National Employment Grid, so a candidate is shown functions and places rather than a national average.
Portals may treat such data as commercially theirs, and I understand that. But an index the whole country quotes, and which quietly decides where a nineteen-year-old trains, has become public infrastructure. It deserves to be published like one.
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
4 Nov 2026
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