“Indian companies are now in a rush to recruit people with digital skills because the supply is far less than demand,” said CK Ranganathan, CMD, CavinKare Pvt Ltd.
He was delivering a special address at a conclave titled “New Age Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship in the age of digital disruption,” during the ninth edition of the Entrepreneur Awards organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Southern Region, here on Thursday.
“We have made some of our employees take digital courses and found that their market value (compensation) has increased from ₹4 lakh a year ago to ₹10-12 lakh now,” Ranganathan added.
Given the dearth of digitally skilled manpower in India, over the next five years, companies will compete to recruit such talent, he added.
He also said that technological disruptions like artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) and blockchain technology will affect our daily lives in more ways in the future.
“We have started a robotic process to create ‘customer master’ and observed that the robot can finish in just one minute and six seconds an entire process that will take a human 25 minutes and 30 seconds to complete,” Ranganathan said. Lauding CII for encouraging entrepreneurship, R Srinivasan, Editor, The Hindu BusinessLine, said the newspaper was started 25 years ago to give voice to southern businesses. “In fact we have dedicated an entire page called ‘Emerging Entrepreneurs’ which focusses on young entrepreneurs,” he added.
Hurdles to scaling up
Noting that the mortality rate in entrepreneurship is “staggeringly high” in India, Srinivasan said, “There is some fundamental problem with our economy and policy which militates against scale.”
“Our policies encourage at start-up stage but hinder when the entrepreneur wants to grow really big,” Srinivasan added.
He also urged the CII to continue mentoring entrepreneurs and work with the government to bring in enabling policies to promote entrepreneurship.
Later in the day, the CII presented awards to entrepreneurs under three categories: Start-up Awards, Emerging Entrepreneur Award and Entrepreneur of the Year. (See box for winners.)
In his opening remarks during the award ceremony, Ranganathan , who is also the chairman for CII Southern Region Entrepreneur Awards 2018, said, “As entrepreneurs grow big, their risk taking appetite is becoming less as they fear failure, which should not be the case.”