At the launch of the ‘Make in India’ week in Mumbai, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had his second encounter with the ‘YuMi’ robot. A small, dual-arm ‘collaborative’ robot, YuMi can see with the help of a camera and perform fine operations that were once the sole domain of human hands.
It’s marketed as the perfect companion to humans on a factory floor. But what it represents is also the end of human labour on the factory floor. As robots grow cheaper, more flexible and gain the ability to learn, the value of hiring a human being gets lesser and lesser. One need only watch CGP Grey’s “Humans Need Not Apply” video to get an understanding of how automation is on course to take your job – no matter what it is (even the soundtrack to the video was composed by a robot).
There is always a degree of fear around new technologies. But India’s demographics give us good reason to be worried. The majority of Indians are young, with more than the population of Russia expected to join the workforce by 2030. To tap this, the dream of Make in India is to generate employment for 100 million workers by 2022.
But by then, it might already be too late – automation will start replacing human jobs en masse by 2021, with one out of every four jobs lost to it worldwide expected to be from India. Could the robot revolution turn India’s demographic dividend into an unemployment nightmare? The answer depends on what skills Indians can bring to the market.
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