At the time when there is enough uncertainty about the jobs in India, rural India is set to be heavily impacted by the onset of new technologies in the next 8-10 years. According to a study, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) based applications are going to transform the rural job scenario in the above mentioned time period. The numbers say that about 2.8 million jobs in India will be created amounting to Rs. 60,000 crores (approx. US$ 8.9 billion).
Let us learn about it in a little more detail.
Rural Jobs In India: The Promising Scenario
The study was conducted by the Broadband India Forum (BIF) in consultation with the Electronics Skill Council of India, Agriculture Skill Council of India and the Healthcare Sector Skill Council. The BIF essentially works on the scope and implementation of Digital Transformation in our country. They announced this study in a seminar on ‘The Impact of IoT on Jobs in Rural India’. It essentially explores the evolution of job creation in agriculture and the healthcare sectors of our country.
Agricultural sector
As we know, agriculture still accounts for the livelihood of a large part of our population in India. As of 2018, however, the percentage of employment in this sector has reduced from 52% in 2010 to 42%. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that out of the 2.8 million jobs to be created, about 2.1 million jobs are set to be created for the agricultural sector. The total value of these 2.1 million jobs amounts to a mammoth Rs 34,000 crores. The implementation of these technologies will cover many fields, like those of satellite mapping, electronic market place, livestock traceability among others. The end goal is to create a smart farm where each and every factor concerning the farm can be monitored by the farmer. This, in turn, can help him predict future outcomes and therefore help in getting better results in the long run.
As can be seen in the table above, the lion’s share of the jobs to be created belong to the application of Livestock traceability. Other important applications of AI and IoT in the agricultural sector include agricultural drones and climate sensing.
With regards to the roles of job created, most of them will belong to the category of field workers. While drone flyers and data analyst jobs will be there in abundance, the least amount of jobs will be created for the Software and App developers.
Healthcare sector
Healthcare has always been an extremely important sector of employment in any country. With leading healthcare providers looking increase their reach of patients by moving into Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities, it is no longer the case a significant fraction of the healthcare professionals only serve a few of the normal population. Initiatives like the government’s Ayushman Bharat initiative is looking towards implementing technologies like that of the IoT to transform the rural healthcare scenario. The implementation of these technologies is set to create about 0.7 million jobs, with its total value amounting to Rs 11,500 crores.
Most of the applications that will take prominence once these technologies come into play include :-
As seen from this table, the most prominent application here will be that of Remote Medical Assistance and Surgery. Other important applications include Smart Pathology and Medical Record Digitisation.
With regards to the roles of the jobs to be created, those of the Skilled Nurses and the Data Entry experts is set to take precedence.
