By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Reskill or die might have become a cliche. But for India’s 4 million-strong IT workforce, it is becoming critical. Nasscom’s president R Chandrasekhar pointed out on Thursday that if companies did not go through “workforce realignment” and swallow associated job losses, “all jobs” would be in peril.

It’s not only lower skilled IT workers who are staring into the abyss. “IT is the first warning bell for every other sector that this is the shape of the future,” he warned. The World Bank, in late 2016, had stated that 69 per cent of all jobs in India are threatened by automation.

Since then, automation has not only become relentless, but is “much faster” than earlier expected. The result? Late last year, clothing major Raymond had stated that it will replace 10,000 jobs with robots in three years, and according to a survey by HR firm Teamlease, both manufacturing and media are likely to be impacted more by automation than IT.

Of the three biggies in IT, TCS and Infosys also registered lower employee counts in the first quarter, down by 1,415 and 1,811 respectively. “But, if companies do not do this... (realign workforces) then all jobs are in peril,” Chandrasekhar pointed out. Tech Mahindra, after apologising to a techie this month for sacking him over phone, had also stated it was aligning its workforce with business objectives and client requirements.

While companies might not have the “luxury” of deciding the pace of change in the global market, as Nasscom says, the way out is to reskill and preserve revenue growth. As long as pace of growth is faster than that of automation, its president pointed out, net employment will grow. Indian IT is still expected to remain a net recruiter this year. However, net recruitment has been on a steady decline, and is expected to fall to 1.3-1.5 lakh this financial year from as much as 2.3 lakh in 2013-14.

The only bright light is that technology has historically created more jobs than it kills. But, these jobs require much higher skill sets, which is exactly why many large firms have already embarked on large scale extensive reskilling efforts.