As AI disrupts traditional career paths, skilled workers like carpenters and barbers are out-earning degree-holding professionals challenging India’s obsession with qualifications
Sutanu Guru
Many of you will be shocked by the assertion in the headline. How can an illiterate, uneducated person who has no professional degree and cannot even understand English earn more than an MBA or an engineer? Well, that is not the norm. Engineers and MBAs do make more money than a carpenter. Yet, I have met carpenters in Bhubaneswar and Delhi who earn more every month than their better educated peers.
If you are wondering about the mystery behind this peculiar reality, do also think about what is happening to MBAs and engineers. Just a few days ago, the “world famous” IT company announced that it is sacking 12,000 employees. Virtually all major IT companies have been sacking employees. Thanks to more innovations at a faster rate in the world of Artificial Intelligence, the bloodbath in the IT sector will become even more cruel and nightmarish. Not just IT, jobs which were once considered safe in a wide variety of sectors and professions will be threatened by successive waves of AI innovation. We have reached a stage when AI tools can diagnose diseases better and faster than specialist doctors. And a stage where robots have started performing complex surgeries. No one is safe.
No one but the “uneducated” self employed people middle class people like you and me look down upon. The demand for carpenters will grow at a rapid pace as more consumers in India enter the market. There will always be a growing demand for electricians and technicians as there is a proliferation of gadgets in offices and homes. More and more lifts or elevators will be installed in small cities like Bhubaneswar in housing societies. You will need people to maintain, service and repair them. New generation automobiles will need specialists to maintain and repair them. As urban housing explodes, there will always be a growing demand for plumbers as water taps and faucets need urgent attention.
One example will illustrate this seeming mystery. There are more than 100 crore Indians who have a haircut at least once every month. In the last two years, I have had a haircut cum massage for Rs 3500 in Delhi and a haircut in a small town called Siwan in Bihar (while covering the 2024 Lok Sabha elections) for Rs 50. Imagine the number of barbers needed for possibly more than 200 crore haircuts every month or more than 2,500 crore haircuts every year. Against this backdrop, compare the future prospects a barber or a “beauty care” professional with that of a person who invested maybe Rs Ten Lakhs to earn a degree in computer sciences. If I were asked to bet, I would bet on the barber. I am not even mentioning owners of kiosks selling cigarettes and knicknacks, street food stall owners, those who own and run dabs and restaurants and “kirana” store owners. Or an “illiterate” farmer who has figured out that growing mushrooms in Koraput can be more rewarding than cultivating rice.
This peculiar and possibly tragic situation is because of two reasons. The first is the obsession of middle class Indians with “degrees” rather than skills. The age of “stable” jobs is gone forever. The only stable jobs are government jobs. That is why you see 10 lakh Indians applying for 500 vacancies for the post of a peon in a government office. While there is a proliferation of professional degree holders like engineers and MBAs, there is a shortage of genuinely skilled professionals. Every company that goes for campus recruitment to management and engineering institutes finds the big majority of “graduates” to be unemployable. Even those who are hired have to be trained in house. Many of you must be occasional or frequent visitors to malls where retail stores sell branded goods. The people whom you encounter assisting you in such stores are almost certainly MBAs. What of these millions of young Indians had chased a genuinely useful skill rather than a fancy degree? As I mentioned earlier, the situation will get worse in the years ahead as AI penetrates all aspects of life and work.
The other tragedy of middle class India is the “Bhadralok” mindset. People with this mindset have an instinctive propensity to look down upon both skilled workers and entrepreneurs. They find it below their “dignity” to enter professions where there is good money to be earned because the work is “low class” and they think most entrepreneurs are thieves. Barbers, plumbers, electricians et al have no such superiority “complex”.
They are happy earning decent money for their families.
(Author has been a media professional for over 3 decades. He is now Executive Director, C Voter Foundation. Views are Personal.)