Sri Lanka faces an acute shortage of labour. The lure of overseas employment has milked away a quarter of the workforce. The available population of blue-collar workers has shrunk and the workforce is increasingly ageing, as younger workers abandon the job prospects looked forward to by their parents. Even those who are available often quit their jobs quickly, seeking greener pastures.
This problem is most acute in areas such as traditional agriculture and plantations, where the younger workers migrate to the overcrowded urban areas. However, it is also felt in labour-intensive service industries, particularly tourism.
For employers and state planners, the panacea for this particular ill is to import workers from overseas. Already, reportedly several thousands of undocumented sub-continental migrants are working in sectors such as construction and eating-houses.
However, as far as development is concerned, this is a dead end, perpetuating inefficient, labour intensive production. Faced with labour shortages and rising wage costs, employers and state planners should prepare for increased automation.
The major economic powers are already on the road to greater automation, and robotics is considered to be an essential part of the next technological revolution. It is estimated that there will be 2.6 million robots installed in factories by 2019, and over half of them will be less than five years old. In 2016, about 290,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide.
Measured by robot densities (i.e. the numbers of robots per 10,000 employees) European Union (EU) countries tend to be relatively highly robotised, especially in established, innovative industrial countries such as Germany (301), Sweden (212) and Denmark (188) – Britain, the ‘sick man of Europe’, only has 71, only marginally above the world average of 69. Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland, with modest robot densities (93 and 127, respectively), there have been staggering installation rates, which are expected to continue in the future.Europe, which is the base for several of the world’s top robotics companies – for example ABB, KUKA, and Universal Robot– is certainly a robotic hotspot. The average annual growth rate of new robot installations to 2019 is forecast to be 14%, considerably higher than the USA’s projected 5%.
However, the EU is dwarfed by East Asia. South Korea has the highest robot density in the world (531), followed by Singapore (395) and Japan (306). South Korea and Japan are also the world’s second and third largest markets for industrial robots, and are home to top robotics companies such as FANUC and Samsung.
The first place is occupied by China, where about 69,000 industrial robots were sold in 2015, considerably more than combined sales in the European market. While its current robot density, at 49, is lower than the world average, under the “Made in China 2025” program, it plans to triple that figure by 2020. China, it is predicted, will account for 40% of the world sales total in 2019.
Sri Lanka needs to get into industrial robotics, if it is to survive in this economic climate. It cannot of course be a haphazard rush, but must be carefully planned by the state in co-operation with the corporate sector and the universities. The first task would be to identify the fields which are in greatest need of automation, and whether the requirement can be fulfilled by off-the-shelf products, or whether specialist robots must be made.
There are many existing consumer robotic products for housekeeping, for instance, which can be used in the hospitality sector, from fuzzy logic washing machines to automatic vacuum cleaners. It may sometimes be sufficient to use an existing product in an innovative manner.
It may, on the other hand, be necessary to develop robots to fulfil tasks specific to Sri Lanka’s industrial needs, where skilled labour is at a premium. A case in point is the cinnamon industry, which faces an acute shortage of cinnamon peelers.
A robotic solution may be possible, on analogy with robot welders of car bodies – although of course the task is more complex, and would probably require the application of fuzzy logic. The coconut industry also provides many opportunities for applying robotic solutions, from plucking the ripe nuts to the dangerous task of milling coir. Of course, increased robotisation can lead to unemployment, by making workers redundant. However, this need not necessarily be so. A joint study by the Mannheim-based Centre for European Economic Research and the University of Utrecht found that the reduced production costs lower market prices, increasing demand, which creates more jobs.
In a fragile economy such as Sri Lanka’s, automation and job creation need to be more carefully managed than in the more robust European economies. It is here that the government can play a key role, in retraining workers made redundant by robots and in providing training in robot maintenance. What has proved to be essential in the countries adopting rapid robotisation is the will to make the transition to robot-based production and to promote the requisite innovative capacity of the country. It is here that Sri Lanka’s challenge lies.