This document summarizes the future of work in India and challenges in preparing the workforce. Key points include: 1) Changing nature of work is creating disruptions globally, including in India. India faces unique challenges in supporting its large workforce. 2) While India has made progress in formal jobs, education, and healthcare, 75% of the population remains in the informal sector without benefits. 3) Widespread automation is disrupting industries but also creating new ones, changing skill demands. Governments must address uncertainties. 4) Investing in "human capital" like health and skills is important for competitiveness but gaps remain, like childhood malnutrition and low literacy. Lifelong learning will be needed for changing skill

1. Abdul Sukkur . S
Future of work – Preparing for Disruptions: Indian context
How India is gearing up in Preperations and towards supporting the Work force??
Introduction :
Changing nature of work has created disruptions , discontinuities as well as opportunities.
This is not seen in some selected countries but across the world , be it a developed country,
or a developing country.
Like any other country , India has it’s own unique set of challenges in preparing and
supporting it’s work force from a governance point of view.
Take the case of India , thanks to globalisation and IT revolution, India became the back
office of the world , with “Bangalored”, an euphemism ,which signifies job loss elsewhere in
the developed economy entering the oxford Dictionary
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Governments in pursuit of economic growth love to invest in physical capital
far less interested in investing in human capital, which is the sum total of a
population’s health, skills, knowledge, experience, and habits. That’s a mistake
many countries made, the case for India was slightly different thanks to ― Nehruvian
socialism‖ in the post independence era
Governments have an important role to play in fostering human capital acquisition.
Fortunately for India since independence significant progress has been made on 3 fronts:
1. Formal Jobs
2. Education access
3. Health care
In the recent years this has only been further augmented with opening up of the economy further and leveraging
of automation/ innovation across sectors. Today India is at the forefront in terms of technical education and
English speaking population with right skills for the global demand in new forms of employment.
While all this is true in terms of progress , for the size of India with a Billion plus population, it is equally
disheartening to find that the informal sector has only increased if not lesser with more than 75% of the
population still in the informal side with no benefits and protection.
Globally as well as in India, Widespread automation is simultaneously disrupting
industries and creating new ones.
New technologies are transforming day-to-day life by creating new lines of
business, new types of firms and new types of workers to operate them.

2. Platforms now enable firms to enter markets without physically being there,
exercise outsized influence and grow without vertically integrating.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and new production methods take root, the demand for
low-skilled labor lessens while that for advanced cognitive skills, sociobehavioral
skills, and skill combinations associated with greater adaptability is rising.
These shifts present uncertainties that all countries must face in order to remain
competitive in the landscape of the future.
Human capital- A new frame work
Kim Yong Kim, former President of the World Bank Group, writes about how governments in
pursuit of economic growth love to invest in physical capital—new roads, beautiful bridges,
gleaming airports, and other infrastructure.
But they are typically far less interested in investing in human capital, which is the sum total
of a population’s health, skills, knowledge, experience, and habits. That’s a mistake,
because neglecting investments in human capital can dramatically weaken a country’s
competitiveness in a rapidly changing world, one in which economies need ever-increasing
amounts of talent to sustain growth.
Governments have an important role to play in fostering human capital acquisition.
Fortunately for India since independence significant progress has been made on 3 fronts:
4. Formal Jobs
5. Education access
6. Health care
Since independence setting up of Navaratna (Nine –crown Jewels) companies, nationalisation banks, setting up
of large and high class educational infrastructure in the form of IITs, IIMs and IISC, Regional Engineering
colleges, State sponsored Arts and science universities, vocational training institutes, Industrial training institutes,
and most important Government medical colleges with needed infrastructure. All these are the beneficial
outcome of Nehruvian socialism, which helped the teaming millions of lower middle class, lower classes move up
the social chain into middle class and further.
These institutions enabled partially / if not fully in ensuring that India jumpstarted from 1950’s on:
1. Stable employed and lifelong employed
2. Stable and ever increasing monthly income and promotions with leave and benefits
3. Free / subsidised quality health care
4. Free/ subsidised English medium education
Indian Government has been more proactive right from the year 1991 the beginning of liberalisation in India.

3. What was gained was further built upon to propel the middle class further into globally visible occupations etc.
At the same time more and more masses started moving towards the urban centres/ cities in India with swelling
middle class.
In the recent years this has only been further augmented with opening up of the economy further and leveraging
of automation/ innovation across sectors. Today India is at the forefront in terms of technical education and
English speaking population with right skills for the global demand in new forms of employment.
While all this is true in terms of progress , for the size of India with a Billion plus population, it is equally
disheartening to find that the informal sector has only increased if not lesser with more than 75% of the
population still in the informal side with no benefits and protection.
True, benefits / protection in the form of freebies etc. have been offered to the lower income groups through the
PDS (Public distribution schemes) of various states, it is not uniform across the country; neither there is
guarantee that the said benefit reaches the targeted group in full and is deployed for the purpose given.
Also for many state governments, these freebies balloon their deficit and hence this is non-sustainable
Yet, there is hope for the 75% of the informal population as some macro measures have been initiated in the
recent years which are:
1. UIN ( Unique identification no) – Aadhar cards – digitising the natonal population’s basic details a
mammoth effort achieved in large measure
2. Universal” Prime ministers health insurance scheme” for all with a 10 Re per annum premium
3. Universal Bank accounts to all – with a Zero balance , in order to digitize and direct transfer
subsidies
4. Very recently announcements on universal social assistance ( monetary) to the tune of 3,000 INR
per month to targeted poor population
All these are bold initiatives, if persisted upon and implemented in a business-like manner, the socio – economic
benefits across the classes is likely to emerge.
Still, government will need to work on skill development and tech readies of the rural, agrarian population in order
to make the transformation broad based and real.
While it’s quite natural for the key stake holders (employees, corporations, societies & countries) to have this
fear( of Job loss), the best way to overcome this fear is to catch the Bull by its Horn, i.e. by understanding the
basic issues faced in the current changing employment landscape and devise and roll out ways to overcome this
fear, rather use this as an opportunity to be capitalised and create value for all concerned.

4. Job losses arise due to 2 basic dilemmas faced worldwide:
1. More and demand for higher wages, benefits are demanded by the work force with lesser and lesser
productivity.
2. Customers or service receivers globally are demanding better quality products and services at lesser
costs. This has put corporates and Governments across the world to resort to alternative ways to fulfil
the market need while ensuring their margins as well.
Following Jobs are likely to be gone with the advent of 4th revolution:
1. low & mid skilled jobs
2. Repetitive data analysis, data mining based decision making jobs
3. Difficult to perform jobs, which can be done by Robots.
4. Agriculture decision making process – climatic inputs, crop health, soil health, price forecasting , price
stabilisation , real time inputs to farmers in order to save/ minimise their losses and maximise their
productivity ( IBM has already developed a tool from India and the world)
Though automation and digital technologies continue to eliminate jobs previously performed by people, they also
create many new jobs by spawning sectors of work, thereby resulting in a net gain in employment. As routine
and job-specific skills are less in-demand, workers must focus on cognitive skills.
Human capital progression:
In 1980 only 5 in 10 primary school-age children in low-income countries were enrolled in school.
By 2015 this number had increased to 8 in 10. In 1980 only 84 of 100 children reached their fifth
birthday, compared with 94 of 100 in 2018.
A child born in the developing world in 1980 could expect to live for 52 years. In 2018 this number
was 65 years.
But a large and unfinished agenda remains. Life expectancy in the developing world still lags far
behind that of rich countries such as the Republic of Korea, where a girl born in 2018 can expect to
live more than 85 years.
Nearly a quarter of children under age 5 are malnourished
Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of primary school children in developing countries fail to achieve
minimum proficiency in learning
As the nature of work changes, human capital becomes more important. Yet significant gaps in
human capital persist across the world. These gaps manifested in low education and health
outcomes hurt the future productivity of workers and future competitiveness of economies. To
address this issue, governments must seek remedies..
3. Life long learning:
Globally, some 250 million children under age 5 are at risk of not reaching their
developmental potential in low- and middle-income countries because of stunting or extreme
poverty. Some 260 million people ages 15–24 are out of school and out of work.

5. More than 2.1 billion working-age adults (ages 15–64) have low reading proficiency.
This module highlights the fact that despite historically low poverty rates and growing life
expectancies, the dangers that remain, especially to children under 5, pose a significant risk
to development.
Poor health care and nutrition at this critical stage of child development, especially during the
“first 1000 days” from conception, lead to decreased cognitive function that last into
adulthood. Subpar primary schools often don’t ensure basic literacy. Youth employment
programs fail to effectively prepare young people transitioning into the workforce. This
module explores programs from pre-natal care to youth employment to adult learning.
Nelson Mandela, the first president of post apartheid South Africa, once said, “Education is the great
engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become
a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that the child of a
farmworker can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have,
not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
Adult learning(Life long learning)
Three promising routes to more effective adult learning programs are better diagnosis and
evaluation, better design, and better delivery.
Adult learning programs are more successful when they are explicitly linked to employment
opportunities
Incorporating soft skills or sociobehavioral skills in training design has shown promise in a country
like Togo
For factory workers in India, acquiring skills such as time management, effective communication,
and financial management increased their productivity
. Even in low- and middle-income countries, many people are employed in jobs that did not exist
three decades ago. India has nearly 4 million app developers; Uganda has over 400,000
internationally certified organic farmers; and China has 100,000 data labelers.
Evidence from developed countries points to job polarization—the expansion of high- and low-skill
jobs coupled with the decline of middle-skill jobs. The demand for workers who can undertake
nonroutine cognitive tasks, such as high-skilled research, is increasing
Conversely, the demand for workers for procedural routine tasks, which are often performed in
middle-skill jobs such as data entry, is declining because of automation

6. In many developing countries, the demand for highskill workers is increasing
The share of workers in high-skill occupations increased by 8 percentage points or more in Bolivia,
Ethiopia, and South Africa from 2000 to 2014.
But the change in demand for low and middle-skill jobs is more heterogeneous across countries.
In Jordan, the share of employment in middle-skill jobs increased by 7.5 percentage points between
2000 and 2016.
In Bangladesh, this share fell by almost 20 percentage points during the same period.This change in
the demand for workers for low- and middle-skill jobs in developing countries is not surprising. What
happens at this end of the skills spectrum is likely to be driven by the competing forces of
automation and globalization. The rate of technology adoption tends to vary considerably across
developing countries.
In Europe and Central Asia, 26 percent of the population had fixed broadband subscriptions in 2016,
compared with just 2 percent in South Asia.
Globalization is bringing the low- and medium-skill jobs of developed countries to some—but not
all—developing countries.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the adoption of digital technology has placed more importance
on general cognitive skills and raised the demand for workers with interpersonal skills. In Cambodia,
El Salvador, Honduras, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, the Philippines, and
Vietnam, more than half of firms report shortages of workers with specific sociobehavioral skills,
such as commitment to work
4. Returns to work and social protection
Innovative Approaches for Ensuring Universal Social Protection for the Future of Work by
ILO
Workers in emerging economies face lower payoffs to work experience than their
counterparts in advanced economies do. In the Netherlands and Sweden, one
additional year of work raises wages by 5.5 percent. In Afghanistan, the
corresponding figure is 0.3 percent.
productivity gains can be made by advancing three priority areas:
1. Decreasing informality in the economy

7. 2. Removing blockages to women in the workplace
3. Enhancing training for agricultural workers
The following broad principles can help to guide policy-makers in strengthening social protection
systems, including floors (European Commission, 2018; ILO and OECD, 2018:
• Universality of protection and accessibility: ensuring effective access for workers in all types of
employment, adapted to their situation and needs.
• Adequacy: ensuring that social protection systems do not only effectively prevent poverty, but
provide appropriate income replacement, in an equitable and sustainable way.
• Transferability: ensuring that social protection systems positively support labour market mobility,
and account for the structural transformation of the labour market and the economy.
• Transparency: ensuring that all actors are fully aware of their rights and responsibilities; that legal
frameworks provide for clear and predictable entitlements; and that administrative procedures are
as simple and clear as possible, fully harnessing the potential of digital technology while protecting
personal data and respecting privacy.
• Gender equality: ensuring that social protection systems are sensitive to the realities that women
and men face in the labour market, in employment and society, and that they promote gender
equality.
• Good governance: ensuring that social protection systems are financed in a sustainable and
equitable way, as well as efficient management and administration. The following two chapters will
discuss some of the policy innovations that can help to prepare social protection systems for the
future of work, starting with a discussion of how contributory mechanisms can be better adapted to
non-standard forms of employment (Chapter 3), and followed by a discussion on strengthening non-
contributory mechanisms to ensure a solid social protection floor (Chapter 4).
Wk 5 : Investing in social inclusion:
Universal social protection programs, highlighting three policy principles which,
considered jointly, should inform a renewed social contract:
1. Encourage universal provision of social assistance, social insurance, and basic
quality services.
2. Promote equal protection of all workers, regardless of their type of employment.

8. 3. Improve the fairness of the tax system by supporting progressivity of a broad tax
base that complements labor income taxation with the taxation of capital.
A social contract envisions the state’s obligations to its citizens and what the state expects in return.
This basic concept has evolved over time. For much of history, social contracts have been imposed
by force or the threat of it.
Technological developments in the digital era merit the injection of new ideas into public debates
about social inclusion—defined as improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of those most
disadvantaged in society. Two elements deserve special attention.
First, using technology, governments have new ways to reach the poor as well as others who lack
access to quality services or tools to manage risks.
Second, the changing nature of work implies adjustment costs for workers. Technology has varying
impacts on skills and the demand for them in the labor market.
This is the right time to think about how to improve social inclusion. The politics of some of the
reforms are complex because of the potential tradeoffs between, for example, investments in the
current generation of workers versus those in future generations
3 questions :
First, how can society frame a new social contract in the context of high informality and the
changing nature of work?
Second, if a government is given a mandate to prepare a social contract aimed at improving fairness
in society, what would be its basic ingredients?
third, how can the state finance any proposed reforms?
Financing Social inclusion
Social inclusion is costly. Simulations suggest that the components of building human capital,
including early childhood development and support for literacy and numeracy by grade three, would
cost around 2.7 percent of GDP in low-income countries and 1.2 percent of GDP in lower-
middleincome countries.
The cost of a more comprehensive human capital package is estimated at 11.5 percent of GDP in
low-income countries and 2.3 percent of GDP in lower-middle-income countries.
In addition to taxes on goods and services, personal and corporate income taxes can play an
important role in increasing revenues in developing countries. Just as technology improves delivery

9. systems for social protection programs, it can facilitate income tax collection by increasing the
number of registered taxpayers and social security contributions
Most of the people in low and middle-income countries covered by social protection receive
assistance in the form of in-kind food. The origin of such support is rooted in countries’
historical pursuit of three interconnected objectives, namely attaining self-sufficiency in food,
managing domestic food prices, and providing income support to the poor.
Understanding the pivotal role of food security is, therefore, central to any poverty response.
Food security strategies have traditionally centered on enhancing agricultural production and
productivity.
India’s state of Chhattisgarh faced a daunting challenge in the mid-2000s. About half of its public
food distribution was leaked, meaning that it never reached the intended beneficiaries. Such a
situation was not unique to that state and fed into a broader skepticism toward in-kind assistance:
many observers predicted that the days of food transfer programs were numbered. By 2012,
however, Chhattisgarh had nearly eliminated leakages, doubled the coverage of the scheme, and
reduced exclusion errors to low single digits.1 The country as a whole continued to consider public
food distribution as a pillar of its rights-based social protection system. Such challenges and
improvements are not unique to India, and any discussion of food transfers invariably leads to the
question, “Why not provide people with cash instead?” When policy makers consider a new social
assistance program, it is likely to be a cash transfer. To be clear, there are solid arguments to support
such an inclination. Above all, cash can, under the right circumstances, provide choice, empower
recipients, and generate local economic multipliers
First, most of the countries examined were relatively low income at the time they introduced the
food interventions; hence, their situation resembled the current conditions of countries at lower
levels of development.
Second, while lower-income countries are increasingly investing in social protection systems—a
relatively new development in many countries in SubSaharan Africa (World Bank 2015)—some have
revived food price subsidies that were popular after independence, such as Ghana and Tanzania in
the 1970s and 1980s (Devereux 2001).3 For example, although the government of Ethiopia has
significantly injected cash into its social protection system, the 2008 global food crisis led to the
introduction of an urban wheat subsidy program costing about US$271 million per year (Kiringai and
others 2016).
Third, this book might be useful for countries with large-scale international humanitarian
assistance. While up to 94 percent of humanitarian aid is still provided in kind, the humanitarian
landscape is transitioning decisively to cash assistance (Gentilini 2016b). Also, about 73 percent of

10. donor-financed, multilateral food aid is now procured in low- and middle-income countries (WFP
2016), creating a local constituency for those measures to be institutionalized in government
budgets. These then may lay the basis for future domestic food programs in a range of low-income
settings.
Finally
Programs would need to continue their process of integration with social protection.
Until recently, one could clearly discern “smart” cash transfer programming from traditional in-kind
support, but today that is much harder to do. Both food and voucher programs can often be
accessed by beneficiaries through electronic cards that resemble standard consumer swipe cards;
they are increasingly underpinned by biometric information to verify beneficiaries’ identity; they are
supported by online devices allowing beneficiaries to choose retailers; and satellite tracking systems
have been leveraged to monitor procurement, storage, and delivery of food programs.
This suggests that in-kind transfers can be connected to coexist with cash transfers, and few social
protection systems are based entirely on food or cash alone.
In-kind assistance has not benefited to the same extent as cash transfers from knowledge-sharing
and learning platforms. This is an area where countries could greatly benefit in exchanging
experiences from reform processes, program design, and implementation. If FOSA programs
continue in their trajectory of alignment with social protection systems, it is important to open up
space for sharing knowledge and information.
Conclusion:
The future of work will be determined by the battle between automation and innovation. In response to
automation, employment in old sectors decline. In response to innovation, new sectors or tasks emerge. The
overall future of employment depends on both.
While the no of jobs is likely to go up significantly worldwide, challenges vary from country to country and also
from person to country. While Government and large corporations must play a role in faciliting the transition of
today’s workforce to be employable in the future scheme of things, it’s also vital for the employees to ensure that
they re-skill themselves and make themselves equally useful, if not more, working along with AI, Robots, drones
etc. in their chosen area of excellence which can’t be easily copied and performed by machines.
It is in this context, developing cognitive, decision making skills becomes very crucial for themselves.

11. Equally important is to ensure that today’s workforce ensures their kids are provided the right education and
health kept intact in their formative years including food security, in order for them to be employable going
forward.
Today’s governments across the world have a more definite role to play in the area of social inclusion and life
long learning facilitation for it’s work force and population as a whole.
with the help of world wide social organisations, Governments and societies at large . All need to work in
tandem, in order to Benefit from the torrential opportunities, thanks to new technologies and disruptive
innovations, unseen in the history of mankind, Can lead to prosperity and health for most if not al
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