India is in the midst of a massive jobs crisis. The unemployment rate has reached a 45-year high (6.1%) in 2017-18 as per leaked data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) report of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). According to the PLFS report, the unemployment problem is especially aggravated in India’s cities and towns. Aside from unemployment, there is employability crisis too in India as per a recently released ILO report.

The increasing Automation is threatening the jobs:

• According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 60 per cent of the formal employment in India relies on “middle-skill” jobs, including clerical, sales, service, skilled agricultural, and trade-related work, all of which are prone to automation.
• For instance, In the case of India, 51.8% of activities can be automated. Japan and Thailand run the risk of 55.7% and 54.8%, respectively, of their activities being automated. Over 40% of activities can be automated across the world.
• Similarly, an American medical school tested IBM’s AI technology Watson to analyse 1,000 cancer diagnoses. In 99% of the cases, Watson was able to recommend treatment plans that matched the suggestions of well-renowned oncologists.
• As the world gets more competitive, as manufacturing gets more competitive, it will use more automation, robotics, technology.
• New technologies like AI and Robotics improve the functional efficiency drastically than manual methods. Thus large industries will increasingly shift towards the automation in the quest of higher productivity.
• Automation threatens to impact women more than men, suggests the report. It points out that woman “are a large component of the workforce in retail, business processing outsourcing and textiles/clothing/footwear”. This is primarily because automation threatens sectors where women form a major part of the workforce.
• Information technology (IT), IT-enabled services (ITeS) and security services, followed by banking, will be the first sectors to feel the heat, wherein manual transactions and processing jobs will become obso Huge numbers of services jobs in these sectors will be made redundant as a few lines of code will be able to perform the same tasks efficiently and effectively, according to PeopleStrong , a HR solution firm.

Measures to tackle the crisis:

• Upskilling and Reskilling as part of the present jobs to cater the need of the industries.
• Incentivizing and encouraging automation in sectors where it is critically necessary.
• Focusing on increasing the efficacy and efficiency of Micro, Small and Medium scale industries.
• Government needs to be inept in creating new employment-generating sectors and reform existing ones at a time when machines are systematically cutting down the workforce requirements in the principal labour-generating triumvirate of manufacturing and services sectors.
• Need to bring structural changes in employment-stagnated areas like Textile, cotton industries to increase employment opportunities in these areas.
• Government needs to bring more and more workers under formal economy so that they enjoy benefits of social security provided by government and companies.
• The concept of “smart” work and demand for specific skills must be encouraged in universities to redesign higher education and training and the state to facilitate job-market transition.
• Futuristic ideas such as livelihood insurance and universal basic income presuppose state capacity to tax and distribute the additional income generated should be pondered upon.

Conclusion:

Automation has economy-wide implications at the macro level and workplace-level implications at the micro level for the worker. The fourth industrial revolution is in progress, India must re-skill workers, rethink social policy, and examine the employment potential of new sectors such as care economy in the long-term.