Just two years back, Automation hogged the global limelight when it became a part of 46th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2016. There was a gathering of leaders from across the globe, international media, global enterprises, academia and social citizens talking about it under the aegis of – “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

Professor Klaus Schwab – Founder & Executive chair World Economic Forum, hinted that the era of automation heralds new a paradigm of opportunities and challenges.Automation is riding on the wave of fourth industrial revolution – digital revolution. Truong Gia Binh (May 20, 2014) This industrial revolution will be no different and is expected to have similar aftermath resulting in world leapfrogging into Smart Industry (Industry 4.0) – eliminating certain job families and creating new ones.

South Asia is quickly catching up with worldwide advances in information technology (IT) and enjoys strong growth and development in that sector. According to a forecast by Gartner, the total value of IT services in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia between now and 2017 will be $74 billion. (Gartner, 2003). Big data and cloud computing are driving progress in banking, healthcare, telecommunications and distribution.South Asia has also become an attractive destination for outsourcing. According to an early-2014 Gartner survey, 3 out of 5 new offshore outsourcing locations in the Asia-Pacific region come from the southeast, and this includes the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.

The South Asia region comprising of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, accounts for 3 percent of the global geographic, nearly 24 percent of the world’s population, around 9 percent of the global economy and a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of US$ 2.9 trillion. The global outsourcing market in India continues to grow at a higher pace compared to the IT-BPM industry. The global IT ; ITeS market reached US $ 1.2 trillion in 2016-17, while the global supply market grew 1.7 times to US $ 173-178 billion. India remained the largest supply destination in the world with a 55% share in 2016-17. Indian IT ; ITeS companies have set up over 1,000 global delivery centres in 200 cities around the world.

This has already led the economic transformation of the country and altered the perception of India in the global economy. India’s cost competitiveness in IT services remains the unique selling proposition (USP) in the global supply market. However, India is also gaining importance in terms of intellectual capital with several global IT companies like Infosys setting up their innovation centres in India. (Raghavendra K, 2018). The IT industry has also created significant demand in the Indian education sector, especially for engineering, technology and computer science. South Asia is now considered to have one of the world’s fastest growth rates, with an average GDP of more than 6% over the past decades.