The twenty-first century is witnessing a fast pace of technological advancements in India and on the other hand, is expected to become the most populous nation by 2025, with a population nearing 1.4 billion. This in turn has contributed to a major challenge for our Nation; being the employment generation ability of various sectors. Every year, 12-13 million youth enter the workforce section and this leaves the nation to address the twin challenge of skilling millions of youth as well as creating employment opportunities for engaging them in gainful employment. While employment generation is the priority for India towards becoming a global growth engine, it is also required to pay attention to labor-intensive sectors along with boosting self-employment.

With this background, the Prime Minister’s Make in India initiative comes as an aid to face the employment generation challenge. The initiative has placed India on the world map as a manufacturing hub and has backed in gaining global recognition for the Indian economy. Out of the 27 sectors, the scheme recognizes the electronics manufacturing sector as the potential game changer for achieving economic growth as well as integrating technology and humans in a symbiotic way. Besides facilitating investment, fostering innovation, and building best-in-class infrastructure, this initiative also focuses on opening up huge job opportunities for the youth and utilizing our nation’s human resources for promoting indigenization and innovation.

Although automation has reduced the dependency on humans, there is still a need for upgrading complex and intricate skills utilized in the manufacturing process. Therefore, expanding employment opportunities for occupations that utilize more of those skills are needed and it encompasses a wide spectrum of technological advancements across the manufacturing value chain.

Electronics Manufacturing – Sector Overview

Electronics manufacturing industry is one of the fastest growing, constantly flourishing and extremely diversified sector, which is developing at a rapid pace due to constant innovation of technologies and growing customer demand for electronics products. The unceasing demand sets the EMS industry on an ever-increasing production trajectory and opens the potential to create millions of job opportunities.

The Make in India initiative is an added benefit to encourage indigenization and is designed to increase GDP growth, tax buoyancy, minimize impact on the environment and avoid brain-drain. Under this scheme, the revival of the manufacturing sector is Government’s top priority with a focus to create jobs by using our nation’s demographic advantage.

India, aspiring to become a global electronics manufacturing and human resource hub, demands for a conscious effort on the part of the Government, Industry, Academia, and all other key stakeholders to holistically engage with each other in creating employment and skilling our resource pool.

Job creation models in the EMS industry should promote an “engaging” atmosphere by:

• Ensuring reskilling and upskilling
• Nurturing young talents
• Enhancing government’s thrust on better policy formation and implementation
• Academic industry engagement and upgrading curriculum
• Cover the gap between the theoretical knowledge and practical application by setting up labs to learn the on-job skills like hand soldering, debugging, inspection & testing, forming, manual through hole assembly, coating, bonding, reading PCB layout and so on
• Efforts to be put to upgrade software as well as train the youth to learn the required software to apply in their job
• Conduct awareness and training on the electronics industry standards like IPC and J-std, packing standards, safety standards & procedures
• Adopting best practices from across the globe
• Offering industry approved perks and recognitions

Final Thoughts

For a developing country like India, still, the most critical challenge is how to scale up successful job creation models and craft suitable job opportunities for suitably skilled candidates. There also exist several limitations in the path of employment generation in labor-intensive sectors such as: the non-availability of trained skilled workers, infrastructure bottlenecks, low levels of investment, labor rules and regulations, and non-competitive export orientation approaches. With initiatives like Make in India, it is inspiring to see the Indian government work as a facilitator in creating new employment streams as well as act as a business partner in getting new business prospects to our country.