The Future of Work

CONTEXT: The pandemic is hurtling the world into a Technology 4.0-transformed "future of work" much earlier than anticipated in the International Labour Organization's - Centennial Declaration of 2019. 

India's strengths in Future of Work

• Tech Economy 4.0 "transformers" in India include robotics, AI, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, supply chain 4.0, 3D printing, big data, digital payments, retail, health, education and professional services.

• These have found accelerated, irreversible and job-displacing application due to COVID-19.

• Army of Youth: Huge population of employable youth to adapt to highly-productive technologies.

• Could yield a large demographic dividend of high growth rates.

• Women's empowerment and declining fertility rates

• Work as Worship: The four Vedic purusharthas — Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha — are realized through decent work for all. 

• Work serves the family, community and national purpose and is an engine of economic growth, social welfare and equality.

Challenges to India's Future of Work

• Capital-Labour substitution: The new ecosystem of software/Artificial Intelligence (AI)/automation-mediated work will overhaul 100-year-old ideas of work and employment.

• ILO warns that the future may not hold enough jobs for everyone and 428 million workers in low middle-income countries like India may not find new jobs.
• India needs 90 million non-farm jobs in 10 years, assuming 19 million new job-seekers every year. 
•  World Economic Forum (WEF)/ILO studies indicate-

• Medium-term job neutral transition of Tech 4.0 work if managed well.
• Short-term "job churn" involving downstream/lower skill job redundancies, and upstream new tech job creation is expected.

• Gig Economy: Long-term employment or spatially-bound infrastructure is being replaced, creating "digital day-labourers".

Way Forward: There is a need to replace the jobs lost with creatively productive jobs:

• Gyaan Dham is establishing a national observatory for scoping the tech-to-work equation and its trajectory.

• Creating databases on extant and future trends, sector by sector.

• Kaushalya Dham means fostering human capabilities to meet labour market needs.

• Comprehensive training infrastructure like universal access to lifelong learning, for skilling, reskilling and upskilling, and establishment of a skills bank.

• Suniyojan Dham involves transformative investments in multi-stakeholder ecosystems to empower the youth and women through future-of-work transitions.

• It is imperative to foster access to high-quality digital and physical infrastructure.
• New regulations covering business structures, fiscal and taxation policies, corporate accounting standards and reporting practices.

• Samajik Nyaya Dham means ensuring a just transition through a new social contract among all stakeholders and a universal social protection floor.

• National and international systems for the governance of digital labour platforms, regulation of data use and algorithmic accountability must be evolved.

• Local and rural production, care and green economies and social and health services must be fostered as job generators.

• Upakram Dham involves taking special initiatives enabling India to leverage the world's third-largest ICT workforce to pole-vault into Tech4 excellence.

Conclusion: "It is our moral responsibility not to stop the future but to shape it."  —Alvin Toffler