COLOMBO: Sri Lanka faces an acute shortage of manpower in many areas, be it in agriculture, industry or construction. Chambers of Commerce and Industry as well as sector-specific guilds have been making representations to the government to import labor from labor-surplus countries like India and Bangladesh on a regulated and systematic basis to fill the labor gap which is expected to widen with post-war economic growth.
While much of the problem of labor shortage in Sri Lanka is due to the migration of Sri Lankan labor, both skilled and unskilled, to the Middle East, Korea and Italy, the more worrying aspects are the aversion for repetitive and boring mechanical jobs and the lack of training for jobs needing higher skills.
It is typically said that the a young Sri Lankan working class man would rather buy a three wheeler on lease and run it for hire, than become a worker in the shop floor of a factory or a construction site even if the wages are higher. The latter jobs are seen as being lowly and fit only for “coolies”. Traditionally coolies were recruited from labor-surplus India but now this cannot be done due to the fear of inundation by migrant Indian labor, a political bugbear, if not a commercial one.
The alternative are either to recruit from other labor-surplus counties like Bangladesh or Nepal or use robots and other machinery to do the boring repetitive jobs. But the traditional robot is a huge machine which has to be kept in a cage because it can be dangerous to be in close proximity to it.
But now relief has come in the form of the Collaborative Robot (or co-bot) invited by Dr.Esben Ostergaard of Denmark.
Collaborative Robots come in various sizes and with various capabilities. They are user-friendly, easy to set up and operate, and being light-weight, can be shifted around by a single worker. They can be programmed to perform simple and repetitive functions by the worker himself through a simple procedure which can be learned in an hour. Co-bots are safe as if a worker touches it even accidentally while it is working, it will just stop.
Demonstrating the use of a co-bot in Colombo this week, Pradeep David , General Manager for India of the Danish company Universal Robots, said that studies have shown that shop floor productivity can be increased by 85 percent by using co-bots. A start-up using co-bots can break even in 195 days in the West and two years in India, he said.
Asked if the use of co-bots would not lead to retrenchment and unemployment, David said that experience across the world, including labor-surplus India, has shown that with the increase in productivity, production, competitiveness, exports and earnings brought about by the use of co-bots, firms have been able to expand, diversify and, employ more labor.
Co-bots do very delicate and precise but repetitive jobs, which a human being may find exhausting and boring. In the case of co-bots, unlike in the case of humans, there is nothing like fatigue affecting production or production quality.
To illustrate this, David cited the case of a small cataract lens manufacturing company in Madurai in Tamil Nadu, which improved the quality of the lenses, and increased production, sales and manufacturing capacity by switching to co-bots. It made a larger number of lenses with amazing accuracy. The co-bot using factory became a bigger employer too.
The market for co-bots has been expanding in the world and India.BMW, Volkswagen, Siemens, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, John Deere, Hindustan Lever, Bajaj Auto, Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur are users of Universal Robots’ co-bots, David said.
Universal Robots’ co-bots have about 200 clients in India and is looking to have about five in Sri Lankain the near future, David said. Some major garment manufactures cum exporters who use conventional robots are now looking for the smaller, more versatile, easy to operate ,worker friendly and mobile, co-bot, David said.