1 Robot to replace 100 Workers

India is inducting around millions of  workers into the ranks of job seekers every month with its burgeoning population which mostly consists of the younger demographic. Most of these job seekers won’t get jobs as the Indian economy has failed to create enough good jobs thanks to the years of brainless and thoughtless policy making by the Congress governments. While the new Modi government has put skill creation and capacity building as the centerpiece of its reforms, this might not be enough. The government’s objective of creating jobs through increasing manufacturing will not work. As the previous central banker Rajan said, the manufacturing export paradigm will not work like it did for China and the South Asian countries in the past. There are too many negative factors against this paradigm now.

While India’s investment and business climate has improved quite rapidly over the last 2 years, the problem is that manufacturing these days does not create too many jobs. Automation and capital intensive industries hardly create many jobs as they did in the past. Now the threat of robots has further decreased the chances of Indian youth to get decent wage paying jobs. The textile industry in India which employs more than 45 million people will soon see the rise of robot competition.

Raymonds which is one of the largest textile manufacturers and brands in India plans to cut 10,000 jobs and replace them with robots. This is an extremely bad sign for the government and policy makers, as even Indian industries where wages are extremely low look to replace workers with robots. If this trend catches on and there is no reason why it will not, then the hundreds of millions of semi skilled and unskilled Indian workers face a very dark future.

India’s employment crisis has worsened to an extent that 500,000 highly educated Indian citizens had applied for 3000 municipal sweeper jobs in India. Though IT and service industry has grown in India, and various government measures like Make in India, Skill India have been launched, but huge population of India and its limited resources are the main problems that India’s employment industry face. Recently the top ecommerce firms in India like Snapdela and Flipkart have also been laying off thousands of people.

Explaining the move, Raymond CEO Sanjay Behl said the company employs over 30,000 staff in their 16 manufacturing plants in the country. “Roughly 2,000 work in each plant. Through technological intervention we are looking to scale down the number of jobs to 20,000, through multiple initiatives in technology. One robot could replace around 100 workers. While it is happening in China at present, it will also happen in India,” he said, adding that the sector was very manpower intensive. He added that a closely monitored team is working on this technology implementation models.

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