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I mean, even if I don't outright starve, I'd rather not end up with little or no money to my name. India certainly can't support any meaningful welfare for its populace, and while standards are low, people aren't going to be happy with settling for meals and little else.
The West can certainly do better, which is why I'm moving my ass there pronto in the hopes I can wrangle citizenship.
Take everything here with a pinch of salt because I'm hardly an expert:
India has always been a secondary consideration for foreign companies looking to perform manufacturing, and the only reason several large companies have started shifting substantial minorities of their production here is because of rising wages in China coupled with their self-induced geopolitical uncertainty.
In order for a country to successfully weather the shock of rapid automation, from my perspective it either needs a great deal of money to buy-in, or large numbers of existing factories that can be easily automated. The former describes the US and most of the West, and the latter describes China. I wouldn't be surprised if both entities managed to make it through with only modest disruption.
On the other hand, India has neither. When other countries begin automating faster than we can with our limited funds, the export value of our goods will drop (but so will the import costs of foreign goods?), reducing the value of our money greatly. We'll have to compete for raw resources that others can afford to pay significantly more for, given their grossly increased productivity.
Add in the effects of unemployment of highly skilled sections of the work force, the kind of people who bring in large amounts of foreign money, such as remote workers, and automation will strike from the top and work down. It'll take time for the government to afford an UBI, and the costs of keeping an increasingly large unproductive chunk of the populace fed will be debilitating.
I'm doubtful of the country's governance capitalizing on the benefits in time to outweigh the massive disruption it'll cause, but once again, I'm no expert.
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