Technology cannot replace manpower.

The Machine and the Human Hand

In November 2023, forty-one workers lay trapped behind tonnes of rubble in the collapsed Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand. A powerful American auger machine was flown in to bore through the debris, and for days the nation watched it grind forward. Then, with the rescuers only metres away, the machine broke down against steel girders. The last stretch was cleared by a team of rat-hole miners who crawled into the pipe and dug by hand, and all forty-one men walked out alive. The episode captures a truth that every wave of automation tends to forget. Technology can replace many human tasks, but it cannot replace the judgement, adaptability and care that only human beings bring, so the real choice before a nation is not between machines and manpower but about how the two are combined.

The fear that machines will make people redundant is old. Between 1811 and 1816, English textile workers known as the Luddites smashed the mechanised looms they believed were stealing their livelihoods. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase technological unemployment for the loss of jobs that happens faster than new uses for labour can be found. Every generation since has rediscovered the same anxiety, from the assembly line to the computer, and today from artificial intelligence. To weigh the statement fairly, we must first admit how much the machine has truly displaced.

The evidence of displacement is real. In 1900, about two in five American workers laboured on farms; today fewer than two in a hundred do, because tractors and combine harvesters do the work of thousands of hands. In India, the share of workers in agriculture fell from roughly seven in ten at Independence to 54.6 per cent in the Census of 2011, as tractors, threshers and pump sets spread after the Green Revolution. A widely cited Oxford study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in 2013 estimated that nearly 47 per cent of jobs in the United States faced a high risk of automation. Robots now weld car bodies, software reads X-rays and chatbots answer customer queries. For the weaver at the power loom or the clerk at the ledger, technology did not merely assist; it replaced.

Yet history also shows that technology destroys particular jobs far more often than it destroys work itself. When ATMs spread across the United States, economists expected bank tellers to vanish. The economist James Bessen found instead that teller jobs did not decline, because cheaper branches allowed banks to open many more of them, and tellers moved from counting cash to advising customers. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2020 estimated that by 2025 automation might displace 85 million jobs while creating 97 million new ones. The machine changes the composition of work rather than abolishing the worker, and new occupations, from app developers to drone pilots, appear that no one could have named a generation earlier.

Moreover, there are domains where human beings remain irreplaceable. Scientists describe Moravec's paradox: tasks that are hard for humans, such as complex calculation, are easy for machines, while tasks a child does effortlessly, such as walking across a cluttered room or reading a face, remain hard for them. Care, teaching, negotiation, leadership and moral judgement belong to this second kind. India's ten lakh ASHA workers, honoured with the WHO Global Health Leaders Award in 2022, did not deliver health care through an algorithm; they knocked on doors, persuaded hesitant mothers and earned trust. During the pandemic the CoWIN platform recorded more than two hundred crore vaccine doses, but every one of those doses was given by a human hand.

Even the most advanced technology is built, run and repaired by people. Chandrayaan-3 landed near the lunar south pole in August 2023 because thousands of engineers and scientists at ISRO designed, tested and corrected it. After the chess computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, Kasparov himself championed centaur chess, in which a human and a machine play together as a team, often outperforming either alone. The lesson is that technology multiplies human capability; it does not make the human redundant. A machine without skilled manpower is like a library without readers.

"What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such." (Mahatma Gandhi)

For India, the question carries special weight. With roughly two-thirds of its people under the age of 35, India cannot copy a labour-saving model designed for ageing societies such as Japan, where robots are deployed partly because there are too few young workers. E.F. Schumacher argued in Small is Beautiful (1973) for intermediate technology that raises the productivity of many workers rather than replacing them. Article 41 of the Constitution asks the State to secure the right to work, and a growth path that sheds jobs while raising output would fail that directive. The danger of jobless growth is not that machines are too clever but that policy lets them be used without regard for who is left behind.

The real threat, then, lies not in technology but in the gap between the speed of technological change and the speed of human adaptation. A worker whose skills become obsolete is not replaced by a machine so much as abandoned by a system that failed to retrain him. This is why initiatives such as the Skill India Mission, launched in 2015, and the push for digital literacy matter as much as the purchase of new machines. Societies that invest in people, as Germany has done through its apprenticeship system, turn automation into an opportunity; societies that neglect them turn it into unemployment and unrest.

There is also an ethical dimension that no technology can supply. An algorithm can sort loan applications, but deciding what is fair to a poor borrower is a human responsibility. A drone can survey a flooded district, but it was fishermen with their own boats who rescued thousands of stranded people during the Kerala floods of 2018. Amartya Sen's capability approach reminds us that development is about expanding what people are able to do and be. Technology serves that goal only when human beings direct it, which is why accountability, compassion and conscience remain human duties.

Building upon this, the wise path lies in complementarity. Machines should take over work that is dangerous, dirty and repetitive, while people are freed for work that needs creativity, empathy and judgement. Manual scavenging, a practice that still kills workers in sewers, is one area where replacing human labour with machines is a moral imperative, not a threat. In medicine, an AI tool can flag a suspicious scan in seconds, while the doctor explains the diagnosis to a frightened patient. The goal is a partnership in which technology raises the value of human work instead of erasing it.

Technology can replace tasks, but it cannot replace the human purpose that gives those tasks meaning. The Silkyara rescue began with a machine and ended with human hands, and that sequence is a fitting image of the future. A nation that treats its people as costs to be automated away will grow richer on paper and poorer in spirit, while a nation that treats technology as a tool in the hands of skilled, dignified workers will gain both prosperity and cohesion. The task before India is not to resist the machine, as the Luddites did, nor to worship it, but to prepare every citizen to work alongside it. Only then will technology fulfil its promise as the servant, and never the master, of human endeavour.