By Gyan Pathak
The waves of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered job marked disruption is knocking at the door of India, more intensively than any other country of the world, which may soon turn into a nightmare, since India is not yet prepared to face the challenge except producing some of the documents to make the government appear greatly concerned, but actually nearly absent from the ground where AI is in operation uncontrolled.
Almost five years ago in June 2018, NITI Aayog had published a discussion paper titled National Strategy for Artificial intelligence. However, did almost nothing to combat the threat, and by the pandemic year 2020, AI adoption in India was highest at 45 per cent, followed by 35 per cent in the US, 28 per cent in Japan, and 23 per cent in the UK, according to PwC report. The report had estimated, AI was to affect 9 per cent of existing workforce in India by 2030, while creating only 20 million new jobs. The estimate was frightening since, the rate of loss of jobs was just double than the rate of job creation.
The situation had already become unprecedentedly worse by July 2023, which is reflected in the statement of AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who said the outsourced programmers in India will see their jobs wiped out in the next year or the two. It should be noted that India has over 5 million programmers who are engaged in outsourced jobs from the foreign countries.
Moreover, this is not the only area of job market which is going to be affected. In fact, almost all areas of the economy, excluding the jobs that has to be done physically by human beings, and that cannot be automated. The PwC report that studied the situation in 2020 during the pandemic had found that India enterprises across sectors had already embraced AI in a more definitive manner because for them it was more of a business necessity than a ‘good-to-have’ solution. A total of 89 per cent of Travel and Hospitality companies had taken the lead in AI implementation, followed by TMT (86 per cent), financial services (82 per cent), and healthcare and pharma (73 per cent).
Now the new PwC study published in June 2023, on the onset of industry 4.0 leading the Indian manufacturing industry to a major transformation, says that Indian industries working is a was for the golden batch using digital twins – automation and AI. About 38 per cent of India companies had participated in their survey, and they were preferring to adopt one standardised digital solution across plants compared to global companies, and showing an upward trend towards adopting analytics and AI with a current implementation rate of 54 per cent.
The worse, Indian companies, spread across the sectors, tend to focus more on people, policies, and mindset while the global companies prefer to build up the right system for driving any transformation, the PwC report revealed. In another report published by the PwC earlier in April, had reported that about 70 per cent of businesses planned to integrated the metaverse into their organisational activities, while additionally, 63 per cent of companies that were actively engaged with the metaverse said they would fully embed the metaverse in their organisational activities within a year.
In 2018 the NITI Aayog document had said that it had decided to focus on five sectors that are envisioned to benefit the most from AI solving societal needs which were healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities and infrastructure, and smart mobility and transportation. However, the paper had identified the barriers also which were – lack of broad-based expertise in research and application of AI; absence of enabling data ecosystem; high resource cost and low awareness for adoption of AI; privacy and security; and absence of collaborative approach to adoption and application of AI. However, there is little evidence that the government has done anything significant on the ground, while the AI-powered job market disruption in the country knocking at the door ever louder.
India is yet to have an appropriate legal framework in place. The country needs to devise it urgently and comprehensively, since it cannot afford and uncontrolled AI-powered job market disruption turning into a nightmare. UNFPA has said that 68 per cent of India’s population are working population. The labour force participation has been hovering around 40 per cent for quite some time, and over 90 per cent of them are already in informal insecure jobs. The AI-powered disruption would heavily cut in the entire spectrum of the formal jobs too, while just wiping out large number of informal and gig jobs in many sectors. Lack of any of the social security coverage for about 74 per cent of the workers would worsen their condition. Unemployment rate has also been hovering at about 8 per cent in recent times, which would further shoot up in a scenario of uncontrolled adoption of the twin deployment of AI and automation.
Reskilling and upskilling the workforce to adapt to the new demands of AI powered jobs and technologies are the need of the hour since we simply cannot wish away the impact of AI-powered job market disruption. But then it involves investing more in education, training, and lifelong learning programmes that forster analytical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and digital literacy skills, rather than promoting BJP-RSS clans outdated concepts relating to education policy.
Urgently developing a robust regulatory and ethical framework for AI that ensures data privacy, security, accountability, and transparency. However, it would not only involve shedding of current governments approach of becoming a “surveillance state”, but also establishing standards, guidelines and best practices for development and deployment of AI that protects the rights and interests of workers and thereby society at large.
It is worth noting that AI is increasingly becoming capable of automating tasks that are performed by humans, and we don’t know where it is leading to. Since AI is becoming increasingly affordable to smaller organisations too, a large number of MSMEs should also be expected to adopt AI in their enterprises in foreseeable future. Over 90 per cent of workforce are employed by MSMEs in India, and hence it would be gross mistake that only big companies or business would be deploying this technology and would go for automation in a big way wiping out large number of regular decent jobs having social security coverage whatever little their workers enjoy as of now. Contractualization and informalisation of jobs in big companies are already in place in a big way without any check, even in the public sector or in the government, that is set to accelerate by adoption of AI and automation.
The argument being given by some that AI would generate enough jobs is wrong, since it is not comparable with earlier industrialisation providing jobs which needed humans to run. However, AI’s case is different, which adopts the nature of human being itself to replace humans in excellent way far more efficiently than humans in majority of cases.
NITI Aayog’s discussion paper released in November 2022, titled “Responsible AI” #AIforall reads well, but it is limited in scope covering chiefly facial recognition technology. Following the National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence (NSAI) 2018, which highlighted the road map ahead, stakeholder consultations were initiated in collaboration with the World Economic Forums in 2019, which culminated into two-part approach paper in 2021. However, where are the appropriate actions? Modi government is too slow and progress in AI is too fast.
“AI a disruption,” admitted Rajeev Chanrashekhar, Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Electronics and Information Technology of India, on the sidelines of a G20 meeting recently, but advised “Don’t overreact to fear narrative on potential human job loss.” Can we ask, why should we not be concerned when AI is being increasingly adopted in large scale across the Indian job market, unchecked and uncontrolled, wiping out jobs in larger numbers day after day? (IPA )
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