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In Next Five Years, 9% Indians Will Be In Jobs That Don’t Exist Today

Jobs of 21 percent of the current Indian workforce may soon face an existential threat.

People working at the Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) Institute of Skills in New Delhi, India. (Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg)
People working at the Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) Institute of Skills in New Delhi, India. (Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg)

India’s job landscape is undergoing a transition due to emerging technologies and that may lead to nine percent of the country’s 600 million estimated workforce being deployed in new jobs that do not even exist today.

That’s what a report by industry bodies FICCI-Nasscom and law firm EY says. There would be a job slowdown in the next two years as companies struggle to restructure their business models, the report said. It added that in the next five years, the entire job landscape would see a drastic change.

The report highlighted the impact of globalisation, demographics, and exponential technologies on the job landscape. It said that by 2022, thirty seven percent of the workforce would be in jobs that would require “radically” changed skill sets.

21 percent of the current workforce would face an “existential threat” due to the adoption of the upcoming new technologies, the report said. 

The adoption of exponential technologies “is disrupting industries by creating new markets and India is at the cusp of this change”, said Anurag Malik, partner at EY India, in the report.

Malik added that if Indian companies rapidly embrace these new technologies then they could potentially transform highly unorganised sectors like transportation, maintenance, food catering, and software development services into organised ones.

The organised manufacturing and services sectors are expected to employ nearly 1 crore more people in the next five years from the current 3.8 crore, according to the report. All the new forms of employment are likely to add 20-25 percent to the organised sector by 2022. This would increase the share of the organised sector in the overall economy to 10 percent from 8 percent at present, the report added.