Future Of Job Market In India: What Is The True Picture?

As per an article in Economic Times ( dated July 5th 2016), a US-based research firm predicted that India's IT service industry will be losing a whopping 6.4 lakh "low-skilled" jobs due to automation in next five years.

There are a few that agree to the fact that there will be a considerable decrease in the job, although they feel that the numbers are a bit exaggerated and it is difficult to quantify the exact numbers. On the other hand the IT Industry body "The National Association of Software and Services Companies" or the NASSCOM which has a totally different view. As per NASSCOM the report has not taken into account various factors like the jobs being created by newer technologies.

Yes, automation is a fact that cannot be overlooked. Automation is not a new concept. We have seen automation in all industries starting from agricultural industry to manufacturing to real estate industry. Technological advancements and automation has helped in giving a quality output in timely manner. And with automation the need of manual labor has gone down. But still manpower is required in these industries too at various levels. At least for now there cannot be a hundred percent dependency on automation and robotic process at all levels. It is hard to predict but next five years is too short for that to happen.

As per Asheesh Mehra, CEO of BPO firm Antworks "The BPO industry is going to be facing the problem of robotic process automation in the next two years. This is a challenge the industry and the country will face".

And BPO process has been graded in the "low skilled" process which is going to be hit badly in the next five years time. But while talking about automation taking over the so called low skilled process we have forgotten that automation and robotic process are still not fully reliable. The best example is the OCR engine (Optimum Character Recognition). OCR has not been able to overcome the challenges it has been facing for a long time. Still the confidence level for this process even on printed documents is not more than 80 per cent to 85 per cent. And let us not forget that it cannot read any language apart from English.

There are many companies which have already reduced their inbound team as most of the basic information can be provided through automated voice messaging systems. But if more details are needed and or some issue (whether technical or non technical) needs to be resolved a customer service representative is still required at the other end to help the customers. Robotic process has not been able to overtake in that area and it will not be able to do so in the near future too.
These are a few example of how automation cannot be of great help and cannot replace manual work.

The demand might go down in the IT/ITES/BPO sector we might see a reduction in the requirements but it will not create a situation where there will be large scale unemployment in India. Also with projects like make in India and smart cities coming up there will be a rise in the demand of people with niche skills in India.

Over the next few weeks I will put forth my views (over a series of articles on the same topic) on how there will be an increase in the demand in job market in India over the next five years.