Robot Apocalypse Does it Matter for India’s Manufacturing Industry?

The study shows that the operational stock of industrial robots in manufacturing industry has been showing a systematic increase with the density of robots in the manufacturing sector increasing from less than one per 10000 manufacturing employment to almost 10 in 2016. Most of the robot use is confined to the automotive industry and within it, the application area of welding. This task is supposed to be very human unfriendly and so the diffusion of industrial robots does not appear to be having a deleterious effect on manufacturing employment. However, with significant developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots are becoming more flexible and this may lead to automation of a number of tasks, which were previously thought to be non automatable.