Feeling fatalistic about India (could just be tunnel vision of negativitity but I hope it's not)
So I know people won't like title and it's fine honestly but I think some things need to be said, I am open to counter arguments , I welcome them to feel better, here it goes:
- AI is uniquely more disastrous for India than any other nation as India's major source of income are outsourced jobs from west and majority like BPO,service support etc are exactly ones that are getting Automated by generative AI, even some entry level coding ones, but also point is India in our history since independence we have largely skipped industrialization, we didn't go like this
Agrarian -> Manufacturing -> Services
we went straight from
Agrarian -> Services effectively.
we don't HAVE an manufacturing foundation to fall back to when AI hits our IT sector to keep up witu production, it means imports will keep increasing without local capacity being able to keep up with growing population needs.
Manufacturing sector is also a necessity because it absorbs millions of low skill workers into feasible production and provides jobs.
Our country has insane amount of pollution, healthcare, infrastructurual issues (we have like 13 out of 20 most polluted cities from world in India itself), and THAT is without India going through large scale industrialization, that is double trouble for us
Majority of "middle class" of India is literally one medical disaster away from slipping into poverty line (India uses vastly increased bar to determine what counts as "poverty") so despite low official statistics our poverty rate is "low" due to national standards than international. Middle class also doesn't have any safety net upon job loss, no financial benefits, no healthcare benefits, infrastructure is often not upto standards either, middle class basically gets nothing from either side bureaucratically, hell India doesn't even have proper organized worker union culture or legal foundation for one for minimum wages, maximum working hours etc.
4.Literacy (now this will probably feel elitist but I am not trying to) :
India's official "literacy" rate is officially 80.9% but here's the problem, As per ASER survey:
Majority are "enrolled" but most are neither proficient nor learning properly
this is worse for Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA):
Last time India participated in 2009 and our ranking was 72 out of 73 countries, officials gave "socio-cultural disconnect","out of context questions", "unfair" as reason only to opt out of it in 2025 as well citing "Pandemic learning gaps", Pandemic wasn't India exclusive for that btw.
and this is just for kids, for "functional literacy" India uses PLFS which is self reported rather than direct testing compared to likes of China/Vietnam, so official "functional literacy" (as in someone who knows how to use knowledge than just be able to read a sentence or sign their name) is significantly lower.
- Disguised employment :
This basically means when someone is "technically" working but it's not adding extra income with more hands, take for example "An farmer and his son working on same 1 acre land for farming", here technically son is "working" but functionally his presence or absence doesn't make same plot give twice as much output, this isn't counted in our unemployment standards.
- Brain drain turning to Net Drain:
While India has always had problem for brain drain already but it is slowly starting to become financial drain to country in long term as well, while remittances from NRIs do contribute to economy in a way but overall it's net loss because majoriy of NRIs never return to India and give up Indian citizenship for foreign, so their value, assets, skills are "lost" to India, whatever remittances they "sent" is usually equivalent to student paying rent to PG for residence for themselves and family before leaving, it's not perpetual skill retention and compounding.
- Diet habits at large are also major issue for health in India, majority of people use minimum protein with maximum carbohydrates, usually daal chawal (which does have full protein profile but density is too less to justify it as healthy, it's more of a survival food), and most people cannot afford vegeterian protein regularly like paneer, soya chunks and even in case of "non veg" it's not a "protein source" for Indians, it's like "once a week" taste or "twice a month", it's not meaningfully protein sufficient per capita consumption for protein.
I am ready for talking on this with people willing to debate.