Automation will take away jobs of 20 crore middle-class young people by 2025: Mohandas Pai

About 20 crore middle-class young people would have no jobs or less jobs by 2025 due to increasing automation and improvement in technology, said  industry veteran T V Mohandas Pai on Thursday.

“By 2025 there will be 200 million young people in the age group of 21-41 with no jobs or less jobs and no body knows what to do with these people. Government policy does not know what to do as they don’t have proper data,” Pai, who is the Chairman of Manipal Global Education Services, said.

“We are going to have demographic nightmare,” he said at AIMA’s National HRM Summit.

About 52 per cent of people, compared to 62 per cent 10 years earlier, are employed in agriculture and number of population which depends on services and industries is growing at 10 per cent, Pai said.

“Disparity between people in agriculture and in service industry is widening and that is getting social attention all across India which has led to various agitation across states,” he said.

He said that companies are looking at automation, developing artificial intelligence in machines which have potential to replace process based jobs.

“Rule-based jobs will get eliminated. Much of middle-class people are involved in rule-based jobs. Rule-based jobs can be made by algorithms. Machines are still not creative. People who are creative will remain,” Pai said.

He said that companies like Foxconn have started deploying robots at work, driver less cars and trucks are being made which are going to adversely impact jobs in coming days.

“Robots are taking over at large number of places. Robots don’t want appraisal, they don’t want work life balance. They work 24 hours. In Delhi, metro is going to be automated.  Automobile industry which employees 1 in 6 people in the world is going to be automated,” Pai said.

He said that in banking sectors too jobs are shrinking because of automation of payment system with the help of ATMs, digital payments.

“Bank branches and employment are now shrinking in America. In India in last 15 years, banks have growth 10-15 times in assets and liabilities but employment has grown 5 per cent. In India very soon there will be robo finance which will search all portals and give you bank loan quote in half an hour,” Pai said.

He said that job creation will be impaired by automation, process of technology, new class of job seekers is going to come in market and HR mangers need to solve this problem.

Make My Trip co-founder and CEO Rajesh Magow said that the company has reduced work force at call centres over the years because of automation in process.

Info Edge Managing Director and CEO Hitesh Oberoi said that HR managers need to work as extended arm of CEOs and groom talent base to help organisation scale up their businesses.