Letter to BS: Govt should incentivise real estate and construction

Radhicka Kapoor’s opinion piece “A push for labour-intensive manufacturing” (June 30) was very well argued but I think her prescription is wrong. The days of cheap labour being a great ad­vantage in manufacturing are long go­ne. At any rate, our labour productivity and quality no­rms have lagged behind China and I doubt we will ever catch up quickly eno­ugh. Any­way, labour de­pendence in ma­nufacturing will reduce sharply post Covid as any company that can afford it will depend on higher automation and robotics. Also, if we hope to be a globally competitive manufacturer, technology adoption, not cheap labour, is the way ahead.

However, that does leave us with a problem — a lot of unemployed, low-ski­l­led labour for whom jobs need to be found. My own prescription would be for the government to incentivise real estate and construction (a huge em­ployer of low skilled labour that has been hit particularly hard) and focus on accelerating its own infrastructure projects, which will also absorb labour (assuming it has any money to do so).

Prosenjit Datta  Noida
 

Radhicka Kapoor responds:
 

It is often argued that automation and ro­botics will spell the end of manufacturing jobs. However, in developing co­untries su­ch as India, where labour costs are still relatively low and there are significant financial costs associated with adopting and implementing new technologies, the pace of automation is likely to be slower than in the advanced world. Therefore, even though it may be technically feasible to automate, it may not be economically feasible to do so. Data from the International Federation of Robotics suggest that thus far robotic usage in India has been concen­trated in capital intensive sectors such as automobiles, while labour-intensive in­du­stries such as textiles, leather and wearing apparel have witnessed almost negligible usage of robots. While, the construction sector is an important source of employment creation, the importance of manufacturing cannot be ignored given the strong backward and forward linkages it has with other sectors of the economy.

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