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India is likely to see a jobs windfall in three areas - sales, services, and logistics. That is because India is a domestic consumption market and when more products are manufactured, they would need to stored, transported, delivered. People would be required to sell them and services jobs to support after-market activities.
Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and executive vice president of human resource services company TeamLease, believes that focussing on just these three areas, and skilling people, can create mass opportunities.
TeamLease came out with a report on the Rs 14,19,000 crore logistics sector this week that stated that the industry, which includes road freight, rail freight, warehousing, waterways, air freight, packaging and courier services is "all set to become the largest infrastructure jobs engine for India".
Here are three highlights:
1. The logistics sector can create three million new jobs over the next four years. Most of these jobs is expected in the formal sector. Road freight, the report said, will be the biggest employment generator accounting for 1.89 million new jobs or 63 per cent of all potential jobs in the sector. The logistics sector currently employs an estimated 10.9 million people.
2. What will drive this growth? Public investment of Rs 6 lakh crore, the infrastructure status to the sector that came in 2017, as well as the GST rollout. The infrastructure status accorded will help in companies accessing low cost, long-term credit. GST is expected to formalise the sector while improving operational efficiency.
3. There is a huge skills deficit that could cripple hiring and growth of the sector, nevertheless. The report stated that Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Pune have the largest skills gap - greater than 100,000 people. Overall, there is a shortage of 950,000 jobs across eight primary logistics sub-sectors. The supply of junior level talent, particularly, is severely short, indicating that logistics jobs are not aspirational. Chakraborty said that India needs an aspiration re-set. There are jobs available but the youth isn't aware of them. To create aspirations, the industry needs role models, completely absent right now.