NITI Aayog's Professional Services Report: India's Next Services-Export Frontier

Core Context

India's services sector has long been the backbone of its export story, but the conversation usually centres on IT and business process outsourcing. This report shifts the spotlight to professional services — high-value, knowledge-intensive activities such as legal practice, accounting and auditing, architecture, engineering and healthcare. These services do more than earn foreign exchange; they support manufacturing, construction and agriculture as critical inputs, making their regulatory health a matter of wider economic significance. As India approaches its demographic peak and works toward the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, NITI Aayog argues that professional services can become a major engine of high-skilled employment, entrepreneurship and innovation, provided the regulatory ecosystem keeps pace.

Latest Developments

The report was launched at a forum of the High-Powered Education to Employment and Enterprise Standing Committee. It benchmarks India's regulatory framework against select foreign jurisdictions and identifies gaps sector by sector. On the numbers: India was the seventh-largest global services exporter in 2024 with a 4.3 percent share of global services exports, up from just 2 percent in 2005. Professional and management consulting services alone made up close to 20 percent of India's total services exports in 2024-25, and the segment's revealed comparative advantage climbed from 0.95 in 2005 to 3.0 in 2024. Using the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index as one benchmark, the report finds legal services the most restricted among Indian professions with a score of 0.865, followed by accounting at 0.762 and architecture at 0.537, while engineering is comparatively open at 0.155. Sector-specific gaps stand out: law firms cannot register as private limited companies or multidisciplinary practices under the Advocates Act, 1961; architects face no mandatory licensing examination; and the National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions Act, 2021 remains only partially implemented, with State Allied and Healthcare Councils constituted in just 26 states and Union Territories. To address these gaps, NITI Aayog proposes a four-pronged strategy: strengthening continuous professional development, elevating professional services within the broader services value chain, adopting global best practices such as mutual recognition agreements, and harnessing emerging trends like artificial intelligence in legal and financial analytics.

UPSC Prelims Angle

• This is the third report under NITI Aayog's Services Thematic Series, a recurring publication series worth remembering for its institutional origin.
• The OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index scores are classic Prelims fodder — knowing that legal services rank as India's most restricted professional segment and engineering the most open is a testable fact.
• India is not a signatory to the WTO's Joint Initiative on Services Domestic Regulation disciplines, even though these apply to it on a most-favoured-nation basis — a nuance examiners like to test.
• India is a full signatory to the Washington Accord (since 2014, through the National Board of Accreditation) for engineering education but is not part of the Sydney or Dublin Accords — a useful international-agreements fact.
• The governing legal instruments cited — the Advocates Act, 1961 and the National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions Act, 2021 — are worth linking to their respective professions for factual recall questions.