Over the past decade and a half, skill development has assumed critical importance in India's policy discourse. In this context, in 2016, a German inspired vocational training programme called Dual System of Training was adopted by the Indian government to ensure a judicious balance of classroom learning and on-the-job training for young people. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty-five national level policy makers in India we examine the drivers of this particular policy adoption and suggest that the sedimentation, expansion and institutionalization of the policy remain embedded in a bureaucracy-driven centralised and hierarchical framework, thereby limiting much of its transformative promise and potential. Our contextual focus on TVET reforms in India characterised by massive youth demographics, competing political compulsions, uneven capitalist development and increasing nationalistic tendencies reveal the complexities of policy adoption from the Global South perspective, an area that remains understudied.