The technology storm is arriving!

We all are accustomed to a regular use of technology instruments. We like it when with the minimum of effort, we are able to extract the maximum amount of output. Try asking the professionals active through the 1980s and 90s about the effort it would take just to make phone calls and receive fax messages! One had to put aside work, and focus and destroy one's energy on contacting people and getting others to prepare documents (and then the copies!). Things very pretty slow. Compared to today, work-efficiencies were not even 10%. Then came the storm called the internet. In just a decade, this storm simplified certain basic complications related to getting work done to such an extent that professionals and entrepreneurs could now focus their energies on more constructive and positive aspects of new work. The quality of life and work rose significantly. Then the arrival of social media made us feel that life without it would not even have been one. We modern humans totally accustomed to smartphones now believe that technology is now at its peak. But, the real storm is yet to arrive. Over the next 10 to 20 years, five major changes will become a part of our lives, which few have even imagined or thought about, today.

Times are changing!

Change 1. Money becoming invisible. The generations to come will wonder about their ancestors who carried physical money (notes, coins) in their wallets. This is now nearing its end. The coming days belong to virtual money. You will be making payments through just one card to anyone - including the vegetable vendor! If all businesses have the type of machines (that take such electronic payments), it would be quite possible. Work already has commenced. India has evolved its own payment system frameworks, and its own payment card too has arrived (the RuPay card). It is obvious that the government will slowly evolve rules and regulations to minimise and eliminate the physical transaction of currency. The benefits are many - instant accounting, a check on black money, procedural ease, ease of transferring subsidies (first to the bank account and then to the cards), etc. Hence, all these things, in an invisible form, will reside inside the card!

Indian GDP's explosive imbalance

Let truth prevail

It makes for an impressive headline across India's newspapers each year - "Services sector leads sectoral growth once again; clocks double-digit growth, pushes GDP above 7%".
The latest Economic Survey of India (2011-12) presented in March 2012 pegs the share of Services in India's GDP at a staggering 59%. Agriculture and Industry both account for the rest.

Such a figure not only makes a great headline, but creates a great comfort zone for our politicians. They love it. It gives them something to showcase, and hide the systemic faults. It creates a strong illusion that the entire economy is moving forward at a good pace. An illusion that somehow the great discomfort that stems from poor contributions from both the agriculture and industry sectors can be padded using the impressive growth figures of the services sector. And to top it, taxing this sector gives easy recourse to funds.

But the truth is far from this.

The truth is : Among the three, the Services sector - by its very nature - is the poorest employer of people. And when such a sector starts dominating the GDP with the wild swagger that we see today, it's the most visible sign that a stage of imbalance has already been reached.

The risk of such an imbalance is clear : Large employment disparity, leading to social chaos. 

Trained manpower is in abundant shortage

India is a huge country, with present population nearing 120 crores (1.2 billion) people. Services sector at present does not employ more than 10-15% of the population. A huge 75% plus of India's working population works in its most unproductive sectors - agriculture and industry.

We cannot ever hope that the service sector will become the biggest employer, or a mass-rapid employer, because it needs "skilled" manpower, and those skills take time to develop; and it has been proven through many studies that the Indian mainstream education system has shamefully failed in staying apace with what corporates want today. Even the National Skills Development Mission cannot hope to remedy the situation because by the time its efforts will start paying off in a big way (if they ever), the imbalance will have tilted the ship over.