Emerging Work Trends in Urban India

“Emerging Work Trends in India: COVID-19 and Beyond is a brilliantly written book capturing the changing dynamics of the workspace in India. It critically and objectively describes the challenges during and after this public health crisis and how it is going to change the landscape in time to come in one of the world's most culturally diverse and vibrant countries. It is a very insightful groundwork that explains the complex interplay of the social, political, and economic factors and their impact on society at large in the given situation.”

Ranjeet S Ajmani, Chief Executive Officer, PlasmaGen BioSciences, Bangalore, India

“A much-needed recipe to learn the changing trends of work towards automation. It spans the entire gamut of manufacturing to services and the need for digitalisation while addressing the socio-political and cultural barriers.”

Bhavik Kumar, Founder & CEO, Medibox, India

“The Covid-19 pandemic has intersected with ongoing digital technology led economic transformations to bring about serious disruptions to work, livelihoods, incomes, and inequalities across rural and urban India. This book offers a comprehensive and inter-disciplinary overview of the precarity, fissures, and exclusions brought about by these ongoing changes. Focusing on the formal and informal sectors, on issues related to skills, gender nature of impacts, and rural-urban divides, and the "the digitalisation of the urban", the volume thoroughly analyses impacts of technology on work and work force to yield significant policy recommendations that address the future of work, and the way forward for reducing inequalities.”

D. Parthasarathy, Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

"The seven essays in this anthology are cohesive, well-written, and well-researched, and they share two common themes. First, they examine elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and robotics, the internet of things, and other digital technologies—and their requirements of energy, communication, water, transportation, health care, property rights, other infrastructure, and, most important, an appropriately skilled labor force. Second, they emphasize the critical need to account for current and likely future inequalities of income, age, geographic location, gender, caste, literacy, language proficiency, and opportunities to participate in evolving sociopolitical and economic environments. Individual chapters focus on workplaces, services, technology, informal sectors, digital technologies, and smart cities and consider the likely changes in how, where, and what Indian workers will produce in the future. The initial chapters provide a global context for specific experiences and the structure of the Indian economy; others describe a large number of central government policies and legislation. All urge a range of policy considerations and recommendations. These perceptive essays will be of great interest to a wide swath of social scientists."

M. J. Frost, emerita, Wittenberg University