COVID-19 opens up a world of opportunity for Kerala

Does the COVID-19 promise any lasting paradigm shift in the Kerala economy? Yes, definitely for good!

Kerala has always been the fountainhead of knowledge workers across India and the world. Professionals, engineers and non-engineers, are employed in all the new-age enterprises including IT, ITES, Fintech, e-commerce, mobility, auditing, education, design & media. They work outside Kerala and make a living there - marrying another Malayali and raising their kids there. Except for people working in Gulf countries who would spend a predominant portion of their earnings in Kerala, they spend only a small portion of their earnings back in Kerala. Most of the time, they don’t even return leaving behind their ancestral properties and parents. We call it the “brain drain”!

This could change, we are now seeing more of them back in Kerala ‘working from home’. We thought they will go back once the COVID-19 eases. But that is still some time away. Amazon extended their “work from home” till June 2021. Many call centres are switching to permanent work from home. Microsoft employees can work remotely forever. TCS plans to keep up to 75% of their employees working from home till 2025. Even our State Bank of India has plans to make “work from home” a permanent feature.

But the future is “work-from-anywhere”. Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, has been exploring “work-from-anywhere” for five years now. He is a great proponent of “work-from-anywhere” predicting a radical shift in the way we work. He shares his thoughts and findings in this article and podcast. He shares that millennials may prefer to explore the world by working from anywhere, ultimately benefitting everyone - Individuals, Organizations and Society. Society and economy in Kerala can benefit from “brain gain” and the eventual spending of their earnings in Kerala.

It is not just the professionals returning back to Kerala. There is more. We can see tourists with extended stays in Kerala. Online education and coaching throw open a new world of opportunities and possibilities for literate women in Kerala households. Families in the US are turning to India for helping their children in homework. Our idle, skilled human resources can find new opportunities to earn by working from their home.

Altogether, Kerala can bustle with new needs and demands created by all of this. This can bring forth a lasting paradigm shift in the Kerala economy, driven by the people.

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