India’s Talent Pool Will Continue To Attract MNCs, Says JPMorgan’s Kalyan

Even as the economic slowdown has added to concerns over unemployment, JPMorgan Chase India’s Madhav Kalyan says the nation’s workforce will provide an opportunity for foreign companies to harness talent.

“India has a very highly talented knowledge force which can drive innovation for companies,” said Kalyan, managing director and chief executive officer at JPMorgan Chase India. “We are seeing many of our foreign clients scale up research & development and design facilities,” Kalyan told BloombergQuint at JPMorgan India Investor Summit. Such service-oriented centres are adding jobs in sectors such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals, he said.

The unemployment rate jumped to a 45-year high of 6.1 percent between July 2017 and June 2018, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey of the National Sample Survey Office. While the government said the data was not comparable with surveys conducted decades ago, the jobless rate doubled in the last six years. A separate study by privately run Azim Premji University, while corroborating the jump in joblessness, found that over a third of about 23 million Indians actively hunting for jobs have a graduation or a higher qualification. And a slowing economy threatens to worsen the situation.

But Kalyan doesn’t expect the slowdown to deter investments by multinational firms. Much of the information on such investments isn’t available in public domain as only 30-40 firms out of 6,000 were listed, he said. “They (MNCs) are in India for the long term and not for just short cycles.”

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