The San Jose Mercury, the main newspaper of the Silicon Valley region, carried an interesting editorial in the recent past, pointing out that about half the founders of the Valley’s billion-dollar tech companies were born outside the U.S. including Elon Musk in South Africa and Sergey Brin in Russia or our very own Vinod Dham, the father of the famous Intel Pentium processor or a Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame.
The irony of all this is not lost on anyone. In spite of the of the great US growth story, a large part due to its expats, the Trump administration chose to close the door to highly talented internationals. Most affected are from our Country. Is this a blessing in disguise? Probably yes, for Europe’s job market booming with more opportunities for highly skilled internationals than ever before. Not so for Indian markets However,. Job markets across the Globe and here in India too, have shrunk though required skill levels have expanded. Whereas the new Job openings include some high-end positions for full-stack developers, data visualization designers, social media specialists and machine learning data scientists, their numbers are too small for our comfort. Deep Learning, AI technologies, Python, Image processing are all sought after skills. Reskilling and upskilling make the difference.
India has in excess of 90% informal market where hiring details are hard to come by. How many are employed, what are the job roles, what are the salaries, what are the benefits they are privy to, what security, if any their employments have, are all grey areas. Another pain point is that all these markets thrive on cash. Twin blows of Demonetisation and the digital push in economy has only made the informal markets and those who depend on them collapse. India’s formal job market remained stagnant even as growth accelerated at the fastest pace among the world’s biggest economies adding insult to injury. The twin blows and GST to add, put breaks on even corporate hiring. Sectors like Automobile, FMCG, Retail, Banking and Financial Services, Real Estate and Pharma Industry all felt the heat. More than 12 million Indians enter the workforce every year as per the government data. Are there 12 million jobs at appropriate levels, year on year, is the million-dollar question. Though the public administration spending has been on the rise, it does not seem to be raising the employment opportunities.
Manufacturing Industry with a thrust on digital manufacturing, has undergone a phenomenal transformation in the last two decades. Large scale Automation, AI, Robotics and special purpose machine tools, have redefined job roles and rendered serval traditional ones redundant. Several manufacturers have outsourced an extent of 90% and above, their operations to other countries to be competitive in an ever-expanding high stakes market. The downside seems to be loss of jobs. IT Industry, one of the largest employers in recent times, has been staring at a local recession. The jobs are mutating to those that require higher order skills with required numbers going down.
According to the Labour Bureau’s survey covering eight employment intensive sectors, which account for 81% of the country’s total organised workforce, the average for the quarters covering 2017 was about 1.25 laks and for the quarters in 2013-2015, was just over 100,000. This was lower than the 150,000 jobs created in the period 2011-13 and much lower than the 300,000 jobs per quarter in the period 2009-11.
We must focus on creating employment opportunities for our citizens so that the demographic dividends of a young population are not easily frittered away. Policies must ensure labour-intensive light manufacturing industries, supported by a conducive investment climate which can deliver productive jobs for low-skilled workers on a large scale. SMEs can contribute a large share of employment but their net job creation rate may remain similar to large firms. Development agencies focused on job creation through SMEs should therefore target small firms that grow over a period of time. Creating wage jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors has great potential in the medium term, but increasing productivity and incomes of people in traditional agriculture can give dividends in the short-term.
India has very few factories that actually employ more than 500 people. Now compare that with China. The largest garment manufacturing factories in China have a workforce of 30,000. In fact, even Bangladesh has garment manufacturing units with 10,000 workers. In India, the numbers rarely go beyond 1,000 workers. In fact, in India, the garment manufacturers prefer to split their workforce into many units, instead of employing many at one unit. Not being in a position to retrench or hire and fire, the Indian establishments do not have the economies of scale required to compete globally.
Instead of an assured employment in the private or a public sector, innovative business models may be a way out. This However, has to be supported by new job markets. A case in point, what with Political Parties promising distribution of lakhs of cows free as poll dollies. Can this be a great business opportunity spinning off many start-ups? Let Internet of cows be the new buzz word. Monitoring cow’s health through a GPS enabled cow collars that track its movements, monitors WBC count, avoids mastitis and helps raise milk production. Cloud, AI and data analytics can also be used to do an on the fly monitoring. Cow fitbits could even monitor their health. Several opportunities wait to be explored in cow herding, AI based milk automation, intelligent cow sheds, massively growing grass, using even the non-arable land, literally making hay while sun shines, veterinary scientists, doctors, cow urine, gobar processing plants and many others proving the proverbial Cow to be a true Kamadhenu.
This is all the more necessary since there are just not enough jobs. Whether it is the lack of resources, government restrictions and policies, inadequate education, inadequate skills, lack of support for job creation, market mismatch, or good old corruption, the fact remains that around 31 million unemployed Indians are currently out of job, according to a report by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. This is where the challenge lies and this is where the opportunity lies.