AUTOMATION IN INDIA WILL BE DANGEROUS
With a population of 135.26 crores, India is ranked second in terms of population. As a developing country, India faces many difficulties in providing its citizens with fundamental rights and necessities such as education, healthcare, sanitation facilities, etc. Among all of the problems that India faces, one of the largest is the problem of unemployment.
India has a huge population of illiterate and unskilled workers, and hence most of the citizens depend on daily wage jobs. However, many of them are learning or at least educating their children to get a better living condition.
One of the most opted fields in India is engineering. Lakhs of students from top schools in India enroll in engineering programs to get a degree and a job, but not many of them get a satisfying salary due to the competition in the field.
In a country where there is already a large part of the population struggling to get a job to sustain their lives, automation acts as a threat. Automation is the use or introduction of automatic machines in manufacturing or other processes. The IT industry of India has shown great inclination towards the thought of using automation.
India’s IT industry is a $160 billion industry and contributes 9.3% to the Gross Domestic Product. It has nearly 3.7 million employees, but with artificial intelligence, most of these jobs are in danger. India’s IT industry has already started using artificial intelligence, with Wipro being the first IT company of India to launch its artificial intelligence platform named Holmes.
The use of AI not only increases the revenue but also increases the speed of generating it. With machines working instead of humans, productivity and cost-efficiency increase, and hence the companies prefer them.
Companies’ use of artificial intelligence ensures that there will be a huge loss of job opportunities, estimated to reduce by 20%-25% in the next three years. According to an employee who lost his job due to automation, if a job requires four manual testers, the number will reduce to one with the use of machines.
As per survey done by students of a top boarding school in India, 69% of the jobs are threatened by automation in the Indian IT industry. Approximately 230,000 employees were hired in FY15, but the number reduced to 200,000 in FY16, clearly indicating that jobs are constantly decreasing due to automation.
The Raymond brand stated that it would cut down 10,000 jobs as robots are more efficient. Many people have already lost their jobs due to this, and others are on the verge of losing their jobs. Most of them are those working in low-skilled jobs in the IT sector.
As the population is constantly increasing in India, providing jobs is necessary for people to have a decent life. However, the Indian government has continuously failed in providing everyone with employment, and because of automation, even those who have can lose their income.
Unemployment is already on the rise. From 1991–2020, the increase in population was 300 million whereas the increase in employment was only 140 million, which is not even half of the population rise. A large population of India is poverty-stricken, and hence providing them with jobs must be a priority of the government and the private sector.
But with the use of machinery, workers not only from the IT sector but also the textile industry are losing their jobs. It is more important now than ever to start focusing on the problems due to automation and the growing population. Hopefully, things will improve with time.