It can become a tool of inclusion or a machine that strengthens old inequalities with new language
Artificial Intelligence has entered India not as science fiction, but as office practice, classroom anxiety, boardroom strategy, and worker insecurity. It writes emails, screens resumes, answers customers, generates code, prepares reports, predicts behavior, and measures productivity.
For some, AI feels like liberation. For others, it feels like a silent hand on the shoulder, whispering: “You may not be needed soon.”
India must discuss AI not only as a story of efficiency. That would be morally lazy. The deeper question is not whether AI can do more work. It can. The question is: whose work will be protected, whose work will be devalued, and whose dignity will be forgotten?
The Indian IT sector has long been a ladder of mobility for the middle class. A young person from a small town could learn to write code, join a technology company, support a family, repay loans, and move into a new social world.
That ladder may not disappear, but it is changing.
When large companies speak of AI agents working alongside human employees, and when hiring slows because machines can take over tasks, the dreams of millions become uncertain. The future does not arrive equally for everyone. It arrives first as an opportunity for the skilled and protected. It arrives as fear for those who stand at the entrance.
This is the moral danger of AI in India. It may not simply replace jobs. It may rearrange hope. Those already fluent in English, digital tools, elite education, networks, and urban opportunity will benefit faster. Those from poorer, rural, Dalit, Adivasi, minority, regional-language, and first-generation backgrounds may be told to “upskill,” as if upskilling were only a matter of motivation.
But opportunity is never only personal. It is social. It depends on electricity, devices, teachers, language, confidence, mentorship, safety, time, and money.
A new inequality may emerge not only between the rich and the poor, but also between the AI-exposed and the AI-excluded, and between the digital natives and the digital immigrants. The first will use AI to multiply productivity, income, and influence. The latter will serve the systems that others own. They will deliver food, drive vehicles, label data, clean offices, manage warehouses, and wait for algorithms to assign their next task.
This is where the gig economy becomes important. India’s platform workers are visible everywhere and protected almost nowhere. They carry our food through the rain. They drive us at night. They bring groceries in minutes. They appear on apps as icons, ratings, and delivery times. But behind the screen is a human being with fatigue, debt, family, illness, risk, and fear.
When an algorithm controls work, pay, visibility, and punishment, the worker may have a boss without a face.
So, we must ask: Can a country call itself digital if its digital workers remain insecure? Can a company call itself innovative if its business model depends on invisible exhaustion? Can consumers celebrate convenience without asking who pays the human cost?
AI is not the enemy. Technology can help doctors diagnose faster, teachers personalize learning, farmers receive weather information, public services become more efficient, and disabled persons gain new forms of access. The problem is not intelligence in machines. The problem is the absence of wisdom in institutions.
India needs an ethics of AI that begins with the last person. This means strong social protection for gig workers. It means transparency in algorithmic decisions. It means reskilling that reaches small towns, government colleges, women, Dalits, Adivasis, minorities, and workers outside elite institutions.
It means labor laws that recognize new forms of digital control. It means companies must be accountable not only for innovation, but also for displacement.
Business schools, and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in particular, have a responsibility. They cannot train managers and technicians merely to maximize efficiency. They must form leaders who ask: What happens to the worker? What happens to the family? What happens to the young graduate whose entry-level job has vanished? What happens to the delivery worker whose body absorbs the cost of our impatience?
The Church and civil society also have a role. They must defend human dignity in a technological age. They must insist that no person is reducible to output, speed, rating, or employability. They must create spaces for young people to speak of fear without shame.
AI will test India’s conscience. It can become a tool of inclusion. Or it can become a machine that strengthens old inequalities with new language. The choice is not technical alone. It is moral.
The future should not belong only to those who own the algorithms. It must also belong to those who carry the parcels, write the code, clean the buildings, answer the calls, and wait anxiously for a chance to live with dignity.
*Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ is a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and professor of business ethics. He writes on ethics, faith, technology, sustainability, management, and human dignity. Website: www.kuru.in | Email: [email protected]. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
