News & Analysis

India Could Have 10Mn Jobs in Two Years

The growth digital transformation and growth of electronics, startups and IT enabled series could see strong job growth

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw believes that the growth in India’s electronics sector, startups and the IT-enabled services could potentially result in 10 million additional jobs coming from the IT sector between 2023 and 2025. These three sectors have already created more than eight million jobs in the economy. 

 

The Minister for IT, Communications and Railways told delegates at a National Level Start-up Initiative organized by the STPI and ESC jointly that India should be easily crossing 10 million over the next two years. He said the country had become a technology producer rather than just remaining a consumer.

 

India is already the second largest manufacturer of mobile phones with the electronics manufacturing sector creating between two to three million jobs. While IT services contributed more than 5.5 lakh jobs, the startup industry contributed close to eight hundred thousand jobs. 

 

Other industries too are shaping up

Vaishnaw also made the point that manufacturing as an industry also began witnessing several innovations in recent times, specifically the smartphone sector, emerging as a major challenger to China. The country is already becoming a major exporter now as opposed to the net importer status that it had a few years back. 

 

The minister said it was not that other sectors of the economy were lagging behind in any way. The railways, chemicals, power and semiconductor industries too have shown technology advancements, with a lot of the R&D efforts continuing at a fast pace. 

 

Diversity is another trend that is discernible now, the Minister said. This is achieved by digitally connecting tier 2 and 3 cities so that entrepreneurship can be nurtured from these cities to widen the bandwidth of the development.

 

All of this comes at a time when the IT industry has been shaken by a spate of layoffs by global Big Tech companies. Google’s parent Alphabet joined others like Meta, Amazon and Microsoft to slash thousands of jobs at a global level, something which had an impact in India as well. 

 

The internet giant has reportedly asked managers to identify 6% of the poorest performers in the company, which adds up to about 10,000 people, to be laid off starting in the New Year.    Meanwhile, there seems to be some apprehension in the central government circles about these spate of layoffs and how many of those would be made on Indian outsourced operations by some of these companies. 

 

 

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