Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekharan said there was a need to create unicorns across sectors outside software to create enough mid-level jobs.

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He said use of technology to improve skills will impact 30 million jobs in sectors such as healthcare, education, agriculture and judiciary.

Chandrasekharan added the country needed jobs in the "middle" compared to the two extremes that exist currently—high-skill, high-productive and low-skilled, low-productive employees.

The Tata Sons chairman said technology should enhance productivity of employed people. India has a unique job profile – high-skill and high-productive people and low-skilled and low-productive people.

"There is a missing middle. We need to create jobs in the middle," he added.

"Our assessment is we can impact 30 million jobs across healthcare, education, agriculture and judiciary," he said.

According to him, it was necessary to demystify the work of specialists such as doctors so that those at the lower levels can do these with the help of technology. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud were the solutions for bridging the gap, he added.

Speaking at the launch of his book--Bridgital Nation, which he co-authored with Roopa Purushothaman, chief economist at Tata Sons, Chandrasekharan said the problem of SMEs needs to be studied, and that they mainly faced challenges of credit.

"There needs to be more unicorns outside of software. On average, employment among SMEs in India is 2 people. That needs to change, we have to study why they are not successful."

"SEZs cannot solve the problem. SMEs biggest problem is lack of access to credit. Startups have venture capital funds but that's not there for SMEs in other sectors."

Chief architect Aadhaar Nandan Nilekani, who launched the book on Monday, cited how training people helped scale Aadhaar to 600 million people in 4.5 years and 1.25 billion people in 8 years.

"We trained 200,000 people as enrollment officers for Aadhaar," he added.

First Published:Feb 3, 2020 8:56 PM IST