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‘Digital India’ working towards empowered Digital Village: Prasad
NEW DELHI: The transformative and ambitious ‘Digital India’ programme of the Government of India has started bearing fruits after six months of its inception and e-services have begun to pick up momentum and reaching the bottom of the pyramid, which is digitally empowering the people of the country.
Making this claim, Communications and Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said today that the governments at the Central and state levels, industry and academia need to work in tandem to accelerate the pace of digitisation.
He was addressing the second edition of the international conference ‘i-Bharat’ organised by FICCI in partnership with the Department of Electronics & IT (DeitY) of the Ministry.
Highlighting the progress of Digital India, Prasad said more than 12,000 rural post office branches had been linked digitally and soon payment banking would also become a reality for the post offices. As part of Digital India, the government had also planned to make Digital Village across the country by linking all schemes with technology. The digital village would be powered by LED lighting, solar energy, skill development centres, e-services like e-education and e-health. To make this programme a success, District Collectors will have to play an important role.
Speaking about e-Taal, Prasad said the web portal disseminates real time statistics of the e-transactions taking place at the national and state level e-Governance Projects. He added that the National e-Governance Plan of the Government sought to provide impetus for long-term growth of e-Governance within the country.
On promoting electronic manufacturing in India, Prasad said the progressive policies and aggressive focus on ‘Make in India’ initiative have played a significant part in the resurgence of the electronics manufacturing sector. Investment in the electronics manufacturing has increased, giving a quantum jump to the sector.
Elaborating on the headway made in connecting gram panchayats of the country with the optical fibre network, Prasad said 18 states were on board and the work was on at a rapid pace. To script a success story with ‘Digital India,’ the government and industry had to look for innovative ways to expedite the process of connecting India digitally, he added.
FICCI President Harshavardhan Neotia said the Government has embarked on a reforms programme focused on making India an easy place to do business. The emphasis has been on simplification and rationalisation of the existing rules and introduction of information technology to make governance more efficient and effective. Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and Mobile number (JAM) trinity is acting as a game changing reform that is allowing transfer of benefits in a leakage-proof, well-targeted and cashless manner.
FICCI-IT Committee chairperson Debjani Ghosh said technology was changing the world and its transformative powers were evidently visible in India. New technologies were deeply impacting governance, society, and security and this year’s i-Bharat conference aimed to bring together leaders from all segments of industry and government to explore and demystify the complex technology trends and reach at solutions and execution techniques of the programs to connect India digitally. She added that the government and industry needed to figure out new solutions to speed up the process of making India digital.
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AI could replace half of entry-level white-collar work: Anthropic study
Hiring in AI-exposed occupations fell 14 per cent post-ChatGPT
SAN FRANCISCO: From lamplighters to elevator operators, waves of technology have repeatedly erased once-common jobs. Now artificial intelligence may be poised to do the same for large swathes of professional work.
A new study by Anthropic suggests that while AI tools are technically capable of performing many knowledge-economy tasks, real-world adoption lags far behind that potential, at least for now.
The report, Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence, by Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, introduces a new metric called “observed exposure,” which compares what AI systems could theoretically perform with what they are actually doing in workplaces.
Using professional interaction data from Anthropic’s Claude model, the researchers found that AI could theoretically cover a wide share of tasks in business, finance, management, computing, mathematics, legal services and office administration. Yet current adoption represents only a small fraction of those capabilities.
That gap between potential and reality reflects a mix of legal barriers, technical limitations and the continued need for human oversight, the study said. But the authors suggest those constraints may prove temporary as the technology matures.
Warnings about AI’s impact on white-collar employment have been growing. CEO Dario Amodei has previously argued that AI could disrupt as much as half of entry-level professional work, while Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has suggested that most professional tasks could eventually be automated within 12 to 18 months.
Highly educated workers most exposed
Contrary to common assumptions, the study finds that workers most exposed to AI are not those in manual labour but highly educated professionals. The most exposed group is 16 percentage points more likely to be female, earns on average 47 per cent more than the least exposed group and is nearly four times as likely to hold a graduate degree.
Occupations including computer programmers, customer service representatives and data entry clerks are among the most vulnerable to automation.
Yet even in highly exposed fields, AI is not yet replacing jobs at scale. The researchers cite routine medical tasks, such as authorising prescription refills, as examples that AI could technically perform but is not widely observed doing in practice.
In the report’s visual framework, actual AI usage (the “red area”) remains far smaller than the theoretical “blue area” of possible tasks. Over time, the researchers expect the red area to expand as adoption deepens.
At the other end of the labour market, roughly 30 per cent of occupations show virtually no AI exposure. Roles such as cooks, mechanics, bartenders and dishwashers still depend heavily on physical presence and manual work that large language models cannot replicate.
Hiring slowdown rather than layoffs
So far the clearest labour-market signal is not mass layoffs but a slowdown in hiring within AI-exposed occupations.
According to the study, job-finding rates in those sectors have fallen about 14 per cent since the arrival of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT compared with 2022 levels. A separate study cited by the authors found a 16 per cent drop in employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles.
Recent labour data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics also point to softer hiring conditions, with employers shedding 92,000 jobs in February and unemployment rising to 4.4 per cent.
Some companies have already linked layoffs to automation. Jack Dorsey said his payments firm Block recently cut nearly half its workforce in part because AI tools allow smaller teams to operate more efficiently.
Not everyone is convinced the technology is solely responsible. Critics such as Marc Benioff have accused some firms of “AI washing”, using automation as a convenient explanation for cost-cutting measures.
Still, the researchers warn that the longer-term risk is a potential “white-collar recession”. If unemployment in the most AI-exposed occupations were to double, from about 3 per cent to 6 per cent, it would mirror the scale of labour-market disruption seen during the Global Financial Crisis.
For now, the shift may simply mean fewer entry-level openings. Some young workers are staying longer in existing roles, switching sectors or returning to education rather than entering AI-exposed fields.
