Robots & Automation Undercut's Make In India Program - Sort of

Written by APCA Staff

Increasingly, the deployment of FRO Automation (Factory, Restaurant and Office) around the world has been accelerating as both automation capabilities increase and prices drop.

Recently, this trend of utilizing FRO Automation has been identified as a major threat to India's "Make in India" program. 

The Make in India program is a national program designed to transform India into a global manufacturing hub but as a further benefit to India, the program is designed to put unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled Indians to work in these factories and in the process to bring potentially millions of Indians out of poverty .

The usage of such technology in these Indian factories will preclude the usage of such unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled labor and nixes Indian's plans to use the Make In India as a major employment program for Indians.

From the foreign company's viewpoint, this usage of FRO Automation is a non-issue -- as long as quality, productivity, yield and confidentiality/secrecy objectives are met, the foreign company most likely has no preference if the work is done by hand or robot.

We've discussed this many times in the past, where the challenges for the large population countries like China and India is how to deploy such modern and necessary technologies in mass while still employing massive populations of unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled labor.

Juxtaposed to this, is a case like Japan, where such advanced technology is the embraced as the solution to a falling population.  While India and China to some extent will find these FRO automation solutions troubling, a country like Japan will find and does find such solutions to be an economic asset and a boon.

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