CEA Nageswaran Urges Youth To Pick ‘Trade Skills’, Says 'Era Of Software Engineer, MBA Over’

Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran said that the youth of the country should focus on ‘trade skills’ and that Indians ‘give little respect’ to manual workers while talking about the concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) impact on the labour market, during an interview with ANI. Highly sought degrees such as Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and Software engineering are no more as effective as in the past because AI could replace some of the work in those fields but not in fields where a human presence is required, Nageswaran added.

He also emphasised that while India benefited majorly from the globalisation in services sector, fragmentation and insulation of economies is becoming more common. This makes it necessary

for India to enhance its competitiveness in the manufacturing sector. Further, he said, the country needs to address both unemployment and unemployability together.

“We have no luxury of worrying about only one of the two issues. We must address both,” he said, in the interview.

Talking about how AI might impact the labour market, Nageswaran said that there are limitations in certain sectors in terms of how many jobs can be generated. As these sectors “will be necessarily capital-intensive and attract less labour or cannot employ more labour,” he said.

“But there is still a lot of space in the labour-intensive manufacturing and labour-intensive services, caregiving, culinary arts, cooking, and hospital staff, and sports education, especially caregiving for elders and counselling for special needs children. In all these areas, the world needs qualified and trained people, not just India. Those are all the areas which will not be impacted by AI. We need to create employability in these areas. And unemployment is, we should call it a livelihood problem,” he explained.

Contrasting Indians’ attitude with those of some European nations, the Chief Economic Advisor said we give “little respect” to manual workers. Indians need to change their attitude with respect to welders, plumbers, electricians, et cetera like people in Switzerland, Japan, Korea, and even China do.

“This country, compared to other countries which actually have grown successful, take Switzerland, take Germany, take Japan or Korea or even China, they place a lot of respectability on trade skills. In this country, we give them little respect. If you are a welder, a plumber, an electrician, and a carpenter, etc., India doesn’t consider [them]. … You know, so we kind of made it unacceptable, unrespectable, and unfashionable. I think that needs to change,” Nageshwaran told ANI.

It should be noted that in lower income countries, the difference in the wages paid to manual workers and to those in the services sector is much greater than in higher income countries, a 2024 wage report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had found.

“Low-income countries suffer from significantly higher wage inequality compared to high-income nations, with nearly 22% of workers earning less than half the median hourly wage,” the report had said. In India, social status is often linked with the social security that comes with certain occupations, according to a report by the Centre for the Study of Developing Society- Lok Niti (CSDS-Lok Niti).

“For a majority of youth an ideal job continues to be one that is located in public sector as it offers them a sense of security, permanence and perhaps social status,” the report said.

Technological advancement would not remove employability in trade-based and human-facing roles, according to Nageswaran.

“The technological advance cannot take away your employability. So you should equip yourself with trade skills. The globalising world gave us an advantage for our software, computer science or MBA education. But that era is over. It’s about trade skills. It’s about soft skills, which AI cannot easily replace, where human presence is required,” he said.

(With ANI inputs)