Artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to India’s services export growth declining by 0.3-0.4 percentage points annually over the next decade, said the Economic Survey on Monday.
It cited a report by Capital Economics on the technology’s impact on services export growth.
“The advent of artificial intelligence casts a huge pall of uncertainty as to its impact on workers across all skill levels – low, semi and high. These will create barriers and hurdles to sustained high growth rates for India in the coming years and decades. Overcoming these requires a grand alliance of union and state governments and the private sector,” said the survey.
The country should focus on agriculture and other relatively less skill-dependent sectors to soothe the impact of AI.
“This only underscores the importance of the relatively less skill-dependent tourism sector for employment generation. Therefore, public policy should pay particular attention to boosting the tourism sector. Governments at all levels and the private sector must work together to realise the sector’s potential,” said the survey.
Trade protectionism, resource-hoarding, excess capacity and dumping, and the advent of AI are narrowing the scope for countries to get growth from manufacturing and services. “That is forcing us to turn conventional wisdom on its head. Can the farm sector be the saviour? A return to roots, as it were, in terms of farming practices and policymaking, can generate higher value addition from agriculture, boost farmers’ income, create opportunities for food processing and exports and make the farm sector both fashionable and productive for India’s urban youth,” said the survey.