'India Has Missed Every Bus'

'We don't know which bus is coming next. I know for sure whatever bus comes next, it will miss that too.'

'I think India has a huge employment and employability crisis that the mainstream media is afraid to talk about.

'The problem with education in India is millions of graduates who are fit only for call center, back office and clerical jobs, all of which will be easily replaced by AI.

'So India is not looking at a demographic dividend but a disaster.'

Wrote Srinath Mallikarjunan, CEO and Chief Scientist at Unmanned Dynamics, in a viral Linkedin post.

The Unmanned Dynamics Web site describes it as 'a multi-disciplinary team of scientists and engineers who convert innovative ideas to world class products.'

"Just having schemes and saying, let's focus on AI today, let's focus on blockchain tomorrow is not going to help," Srinath Mallikarjunan tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier in the concluding segment of a two-part interview.

• Part 1 of the Interview: 'How Do Students Get 100% In Exams?'

While India moved from BPO to services to GCC, China shocked the world by coming out with DeepSeek AI.
Do you think India has missed the AI bus?

India has missed every bus; not just one bus but it has missed one bus after the other.

We don't know which bus is coming next. I know for sure whatever bus comes next, it will miss that too.

Unless...?

Unless there is a change in the education system..

Unless companies find it easy to do business...

Just having schemes and saying, let's focus on AI today, let's focus on blockchain tomorrow, is not going to help.

If your basics are right, you can choose which field you want to go to. You can't just change fields just like that.

For example in AI in India, you see most of the jobs are in classification. Would you say this is a well-paying AI job?

The problem is, there is no long-term vision in the education policy.

40% of India's population is below the age of 25. 65% of the population is below the age of 35.
Though the government says the young population is India's advantage, job creation is not happening....

Job creation is not happening, and the young population is not qualified as they should be.

So what happens is, they can only get very low-paying jobs.

Under-employment...

Yes, under-employment. The gig workers are the classic example. So many of them are college graduates.

On the other side, there are people who are over-qualified, who have understood their subjects, but they find that there are absolutely no avenue for them.

So, you have both these extremes.

In 2017 when I interviewed former Infosys CFO V Balakrishnan, he remarked that job creation was not happening in India.
He also said that it meant the demographic dividend everybody was talking about, would become a demographic disaster.
In 2025, we are talking about the same thing...

It is not good for any society to have a huge number of young people without jobs or money.

Let's look at the people who are going to the US or Canada or any such country illegally giving lakhs of rupees to some agents.

These people might have felt cheated after having spent a lot of money to get a degree which they ultimately find is useless as they have not learnt anything.

They don't find a job too.

Out of desperation, they sell whatever assets their families have to go to another country with the hope that they will get a job at least somewhere else. Even by doing some manual labour, they hope to make a life for themselves.

It is not that they are fascinated by the bright lights of New York or want to be a broker on Wall Street.

What drives them is sheer desperation to save their lives.

Do you feel the political class prefers to sell just dreams rather than offering good education and jobs?

Of course, they are. Fixing the system requires deep thought and work but selling dreams is easy.

So, anyone will take the easy way out. That's why they do this.

IMAGE: Srinath Mallikarjunan

The demographic dividend which is much talked about will be over soon. With the fertility rate in India declining from 2-1 to 1.73, India will have more elderly people than young in no time. ..

There is a reason behind this too. When people in their 20s cannot find meaningful employment, how can they think of starting a family?

Then the fertility rate will come down.

I am sorry to say, I am not optimistic about the future because, to fix the problem, you have to acknowledge that a problem exists.

It is like a doctor prescribing paracetamol to a cancer patient and saying he will be fine tomorrow. The patient may feel happy at that moment thinking he will be fine soon. Does that cure his cancer? No.

Then, one fine day, he will realise that it is too late to treat cancer.

The only positive thing I see is, unlike a human being's lifetime which is finite, a nation's lifetime is infinite.

So, even if four generations are lost in terms of leading unsatisfied lives, if at some point someone wakes up and fixes the structural flaws, at least the fifth or sixth generation from now can be saved.

But to imagine that by 2047, we will be better than the US or China is just living in a dream world.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com