Skill devpt programme for blind launched
Infosys
and EquiBeing Foundation launched Swabhimaan, a transformative skill development and livelihood programme for persons with visual impairment in Mysuru district. The launch event, which was held at the Wadiyar Centre for Architecture here brought together key stakeholders, and community members committed to disability inclusion.
The programme was inaugurated by Mysore MP Yaduveer Wadiyar. He said, "Mysuru will and should be a model inclusive city—one that leads the way in empowering every individual, regardless of ability, with dignity and opportunity." Swabhimaan aims to equip blind with the skills and tools needed to thrive in the workforce and participate in society.
Dr Ananthalakshmi, founder-CEO of EquiBeing Foundation, said, "We believe that Mysuru offers fertile ground for pioneering models of inclusion. This collaboration reaffirms our belief that when institutions and communities come together, real change becomes possible." Sudhanva Dhananjaya, chairman, Excel Group, Vanishree C,VP, Infosys, Mahesh Kumar Basavarajappa, program manager, Infosys Foundation, Vinayak Hegde, Infosys Mysore DC head, Indumati Srinivasan, financial controller, IISc, M Nikhilesh, founder & director, Kalisu Foundation were present.
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This was catastrophic for skilled manual labourers — think weavers — and horses. To keep society intact, the world invented knowledge work, elaborate bureaucracies, and the service industry. In the early 21st century, we are at a point where AI tools are good enough to replace knowledge work and disrupt the service industry. Again, it is going to be catastrophic for a lot of people, though horses will be spared this time. The Indian government, along with other governments, will soften the blow with new policies and probably more bureaucracy. But the hammer will fall in the coming years, and pain will be is also the pain that, in some ways, TCL, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and their ilk deserve. Despite a huge opportunity open to them in the last 20 years, they have been happy doing the unimaginative and lazy work and have kept billing their rich or unsuspecting clients for Valley creates libraries, programming languages and products. Indian coders use and service them. Instead of building novel expertise, the biggest flex of Indian IT giants has been to hire coders from Pilani at a salary that is less than that of a Starbucks barista in San Francisco. In other words, they have focused on arbitrage instead of building something unique. Their profits have not been invested in R&D or product has been synonymous with servicing the tech industry, but only because the rest of the world, for whatever reasons, doesn't seem too enthusiastic about it. Europe, still flush with money from the colonial era and from intellectual property, doesn't want this Korea, China and Asian island nations until now did not have enough familiarity with English to do it on the scale India could. Skilled labour in the US is too pricey. The rest of the world just doesn't have enough knowledge, workers or stability to do what India managed in Bengaluru and is a bit of luck that made India an IT powerhouse and not necessarily our abilities. 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But they did not stay OEMs. In a few years, they became product companies in their own right, first domestically and then globally. From BYD to Oppo, they all started as makers of parts or products for others. But gradually they expanded, with a vision to be manufacturers of something Indian IT giant has made a transition like this. In a country famed for its supposed IT prowess, we don't have a proper operating system for phones or computers that we can call our own. In fact, in a country of IT giants, we don't have a locally-made media player, a chat app, a browser, even a proper video game, or maybe a file explorer that is as good as or better than its global counterparts. Even in the late 2010s, when it became clear that the next wave in tech is going to be around AI, Indian IT giants kept slumbering. It's not that they did not have money. They have plenty of profits coming in. But they had no vision. They never had any vision beyond the the chickens are coming home to roost. When you build an industry on the basis of arbitrage, sooner or later, it is going to be upended. This is what is happening in 2025 and will only gather a week or so, OpenAI is expected to launch ChatGPT 5 and there is chatter that this one is specifically going to be great at coding, better than even the Claude Opus 4, which is already considered a coding tool as good as an entry-level software it another three to four years and the kind of work that our IT giants do will be manageable by AI systems. Humans will still be required, particularly for complex, challenging and novel work. But for that work, you may not need 10,000 employees. It could be the kind of work that employees do at Nvidia, an almost $4 trillion company, but with just 26,000 comparison, TCS has over 6 lakh employees. A lot of these employees are going to find that in the next two to three years, ChatGPT will be able to do their work faster, more efficiently and cheaper.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)- Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)
