Hyderabad: While recent reports estimate that India will be second only to China in terms of Internet users by 2015, with 330 million online, industry experts opine that this growth of ICT will also lead to disruption in professions.
This means about 163 million manufacturing jobs will be lost in the next 30 years to technology disruption as against 31 million jobs lost in the last 30 years.
A McKinsey report says that Internet usage contributes $30 billion of India’s GDP. This could treble to $100 billion “if the country follows an inclusive path of Internet expansion,” it adds.
Elaborating further, Prasanto Kumar Roy of Cybermedia says: “Gradually, human resources will be replaced by automation. This is already evident in the telecom sector where you have automated service when you call on customer care,” he said, adding automation could grow to 70 per cent from the current 40 per cent and “reversal of global sourcing” will seep in.
This is the way forward, claimed industry experts at the FICCI Mega Trends Road Show hel at the Indian School of Business.
Discussing the six mega trends — the third industrial revolution, new business models in the age of distributed capitalism, intelligent technologies and future of work, collaborative education, the ascendance of civil society, and continental markets and continental political unions — experts also highlighted the security challenges.
“While the usage of Internet is growing faster than we can imagine, there is also a security challenge we need to address... be it women’s safety or surveillance or readying ourselves for emergencies... That is where we need the effective use of technology and this will shape who we are,” said Sangita Reddy, director of Apollo Hospitals.
