Western AI agents are coming for India’s IT jobs. New Delhi is chasing the wrong threat |
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Western AI agents are coming for India’s IT jobs. New Delhi is chasing the wrong threat
If the Indian government spends the next five years regulating AI outputs, it will wake up to find it has lost the very workforce that built its services-led growth model.
India is chasing a trillion-dollar digital economy even as Western AI agents displace its five-million-strong IT workforce. Yet New Delhi remains more focused on regulating AI-generated content and deepfakes than on creating a transition policy for the very workers who built ‘Digital India’ and now face the risk of their roles becoming obsolete due to automation.
For three decades, the fundamental business model of the Indian economy has been global labour arbitrage. India provided the human labour that the West needed for writing codes, maintaining servers and executing business processes at a fraction of the cost. This engine built the modern Indian middle class, transforming Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Gurugram into the back offices of the world.
Today, that model is breaking down in real time, and the Indian policy apparatus is misreading the primary risk.
The West is transitioning
The danger to India’s $250 billion IT services sector isn’t that AI can write Python scripts faster than a junior........