Globalisation, Technology Transfer and Growing Inequalities in India

Globalisation and transfer of technology in the recent past have brought about significant changes in the process of production of goods and services providing services to the ever growing size and variety of clients which is looked upon as a positive development.  But the fact that needs to be looked into is, what implications it has for the workforce in terms of wage inequalities which is an equally important issue. Increasingly advanced technology applied to various sectors in service and manufacturing is assumed to call for new skills and tasks, normally of higher sophistication and complexity which may result in increased real wages for highly skilled sections of workforce.  Another outcome of this development is steady decline in proportion of moderately skilled workers by automated systems of task performance, which again could have wage implications for the remaining workforce resulting in greater inequalities.  This assumption was tested in eight large capital goods and consumer durables industries in India which had taken up technology up gradation in their plants in the recent past, employing organisational survey schedule.  The findings show that technology up gradation leads to greater work force polarization through skill bias and has positive implications for highly skilled sections of the work force.   At the same time the study reveals that bulk of moderately skilled workers could face the threat of being obsolete and lay off.  Further, disproportionate increase in wages of highly skilled workers has increased work place inequality with unskilled portion of the workforce looked upon as disposable.