III
In Malthus’ dark prognosis, children were born where food was found in abundance – and soon a growing population consumed that food. A paradox of India’s job-to-people ratio is that babies are arriving in regions that are not creating jobs. Tomorrow’s Indians are being born in the east – eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. As it happens, the jobs are elsewhere.
It is important to understand this geographical discrepancy. India’s GDP is today valued at US$ 2.2 trillion. In the next decade, by 2025-26, maybe earlier, it should touch US$ 5 trillion. About two-thirds of it will be located in three mega regions with a GDP of US$ 1 trillion each. First, the National Capital Region, comprising Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida, but stretching to Jaipur and Meerut and Gwalior. Second, the Mumbai-Pune-Thane belt, extending by way of the National Highway to Ahmedabad and constituting the southern end of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. Third, the 350 km stretch from Chennai to Bangalore.
This is where job seekers will go. The workplaces they encounter will be peopled differently from those of earlier decades. In the most basic reckoning, this will be a tribute to Indians living longer – a happy product of better health and increased life expectancy – and giving this country substantial ageing and as well as young populations. The absence of comprehensive public-funded social security will mean workers and their families will have to look after themselves longer, as they live longer. Theoretically, this could lead to grandfather and grandchild being colleagues. At any rate, it will certainly make for engaging multi-generational workplaces.
In such a framework, nobody may ever truly retire and working life may be a constant series of reinventions and re-tooling of individual skills. Those who retire from safe, secure white-collar jobs at 60 will find that they are fated to live into their 80s, a decade longer than their parents, and their financial savings and pension schemes are inadequate. Those at the other end of the spectrum, moving from absolutely poverty to lower or neo-middle class status, will have to build their own social security nets, realizing that the so-called “real jobs” are gone forever and the old dream of sitting in an office room from 9 am to 5 pm is not available off-the-shelf anymore.
Inevitably and inexorably, everybody will be pushed into a self-starter, skill-seller and individual driven job market. Frankly, this predicament or situation is not unknown to vast sections of Indian society. The West, on its part, is waking to it only now. It has even coined a term for this phenomenon: the gig economy.
Ironically, the gig economy is leading to consequences and interpretations that are far apart in the West and in India. Take app-based taxi aggregator services such as Uber, Lyft or Ola. In the United Kingdom or the United States, they have taken drivers from jobs in traditional cab companies to mini-entrepreneurship, with no job security and initially high and then volatile returns: from formal employment to the adventure of informal employment.
In India, however, the gig economy is not a climb down, it is a leg-up. The same app-based cab services are moving drivers from the informal economy to the formal economy, from cash transactions to bank credits. Actually, this Uber-isation of our roads and minds is a pointer to the job landscape in the 21st century. In the gig economy:
- There will be financial rewards for effort but these will not be guaranteed. The same effort could fetch different rewards on different days
- An individual’s skills set (driving a car, providing health care support in a hospice for the aged) will be his or her responsibility to attain and to take to the buyer or where demand is
- Irrespective of where you are in the value chain, you are more likely to be your own boss than your parent was
- There will be no accounts office to go to at the end of the month to pick up a cheque and no provision of provident fund and medical insurance schemes by a benevolent employer. You are on your own
- Technology will not allow workers to switch off. There will be no designated work and leisure times. People will make their own choices
The gig economy began as a fad, evolved into a trend and is beginning to represent a new normal. Is it a harbinger to how 21st century India will know and engage with jobs?
Ashok Malik, Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation writes this piece for FICCI publication “Economy of Jobs”
