#FactCheck- Old Bangladesh Clip Misused as West Bengal Election Incident

Introduction

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AI is transforming the way work is done and redefining the nature of jobs over the next decade. In the case of India, it is not just what duties will be taken over by machines, but how millions of employees will move to other sectors, which skills will become more sought-after, and how policy will have to change in response. This article relies on recent labour data of India's Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS, 2023-24) and discusses the vulnerabilities to disruption by location and social groups. It recommends viable actions that can be taken to ensure that risks are minimised and economic benefits maximised.

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India’s Labour Market and Its Automation Readiness

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According to India’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), the labour market is changing and growing. Participation in the labour force improved to 60.1 per percent in 2023-24 versus 57.9 per cent the year before, and the ratio of the worker population also improved, signifying the increased employment uptake both in the rural and urban geographies (PLFS, 2023-24). There has also been an upsurge of female involvement. However,  a big portion of the job market has been low-wage and informal, with most of the jobs being routine and thus most vulnerable to automation. The statistics indicate a two-tiered reality of the Indian labour market: an increased number of working individuals and a structural weakness.

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AI-Driven Automation’s Impact on Tasks and Emerging Opportunities 

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AI-driven automation, for the most part,  affects the task components of jobs rather than wiping out whole jobs. The most automatable tasks are routine and manual, and more recent developments in AI have extended to non-routine cognitive tasks like document review, customer query handling, basic coding and first-level decision-making. There are two concurrent findings of global studies. To start with, part of the ongoing tasks will be automated or expedited. Second, there will be completely new tasks and work positions around data annotation, the operation of AI systems, prompt engineering, algorithmic supervision and AI adherence (World Bank, 2025; McKinsey, 2017).

In the case of India, this change will be skewed by sector. The manufacturing, back-office IT services, retail and parts of financial services will see the highest rate of disruption due to the concentration of routine processes with the ease of technology adoption. In comparison, healthcare, education, high-tech manufacturing and AI safety auditing are placed to create new skilled jobs. NITI Aayog estimates huge returns in GDP with the adoption of AI but emphasises that India has to invest simultaneously in job creation and reskilling to achieve the returns (NITI Aayog, 2025).

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Groups with Highest Vulnerability in the Transition to Automation

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The PLFS emphasises that a large portion of the Indian population does not have any formal employment and that the social protection is minimal and formal training is not available to them. The risk of displacement is likely to be the greatest for informal employees, making up almost 90% of India’s labour force, who carry out low-skilled, repetitive jobs in the manufacturing and retail industry (PLFS, 2023-24). Women and young people in low-level service jobs also face a greater challenge of transition pressure unless the reskilling and placement efforts can be tailored to them. Meanwhile, major cities and urban centres are likely to have openings for most of the new skilled opportunities at the expense of an increasing geographic and social divide. 

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The Skills and Supply Challenge

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While India’s education and research ecosystem is expanding, there remain significant gaps in preparing the workforce for AI-driven change. Given the vulnerabilities highlighted earlier, AI-focused reskilling must be a priority to equip workers with practical skills that meet industry needs. Short modular programs in areas such as cloud technologies, AI operations, data annotation, human-AI interaction, and cybersecurity can provide workers with employable skills. Particular attention should be given to routine-intensive sectors like manufacturing, retail, and back-office services, as well as to regions with high informal employment or lower access to formal training. Public-private partnerships and localised training initiatives can help ensure that reskilling translates into concrete job opportunities rather than purely theoretical knowledge (NITI Aayog, 2025)

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The Way Forward

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To facilitate the change process, the policy should focus on three interconnected goals: safeguarding the vulnerable, developing competencies on a large-scale level, and directing innovation towards the widespread ability to benefit.

1. Protect the vulnerable through social buffers. Provide informal workers with social protection in the form of portable benefits, temporary income insurance based on reskilling, and earned training leave. While the new labour codes provide essential protections such as unemployment allowances and minimum wage standards, they could be strengthened by incorporating explicit provisions for reskilling. This would better support informal workers during job transitions and enhance workforce adaptability.
2. Short modular courses on cloud computing, cybersecurity, data annotation, AI operations, and human-AI interaction should be planned through collaboration between public and private training providers. Special preference should be given to industry-certified certifications and apprenticeship-based placements. These apprenticeships should be made accessible in multiple languages to ensure inclusivity. Existing government initiatives, such as NASSCOM’s Future Skills Prime, need better outreach and marketing to reach the workforce effectively.
3. Enhance local labour market mediators. Close the disparity between local demand and the supply of labour in the industry by enhancing placement services and government-subsidised internship programmes for displaced employees and encouraging firms to hire and train locally.
4. Invest in AI literacy, AI ethics, and basic education. Democratise access to research and learning by introducing AI literacy in schools, increasing STEM seats in universities, and creating AI labs in the region (NITI Aayog, 2025).
5. Encourage AI adoption that creates jobs rather than replaces them. Fiscal and regulatory incentives should prioritise AI tools that augment worker productivity in routine roles instead of eliminating positions. Public procurement can support firms that demonstrate responsible and inclusive deployment of AI, ensuring technology benefits both business and workforce.
6. Supervise and oversee the transition. Use PLFS and real-time administrative data to monitor shrinking and expanding occupations. High-frequency labour market dashboards will allow making specific interventions in those regions in which the acceleration of displacement occurs.

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Conclusion

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The integration of AI will significantly impact the future of the Indian workforce, but policy will determine its effect on the labour market.  The PLFS indicates increased employment but a structural weakness of informal and routine employment. Evidence from the Indian market and international research points to the fact that the appropriate combination of social protection, skills building and responsible technology implementation can change disruption into a path of upward mobility. There is a very limited window of action. The extent to which India will realise the productivity and GDP benefits predicted by national research, alongside the investments made in labour market infrastructure, remains uncertain. It is crucial that these efforts lead to the capture of gains and facilitate a fair and inclusive transition for workers.

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References

• Annual Report Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) JULY 2022 - JUNE 2023. 
• Future Jobs: Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Platforms in East Asia and Pacific, World Bank. 
• Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: What the Future of Work Will Mean for Jobs, Skills, and Wages, McKinsey Global Institute 
• Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy, NITI Aayog
• India central bank chief warns of financial stability risks from growing use of AI, Reuters 
• AI Cyber Attacks Statistics 2025, SQ Magazine. 

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Introduction 

Prebunking is a technique that shifts the focus from directly challenging falsehoods or telling people what they need to believe to understanding how people are manipulated and misled online to begin with. It is a growing field of research that aims to help people resist persuasion by misinformation. Prebunking, or "attitudinal inoculation," is a way to teach people to spot and resist manipulative messages before they happen.  The crux of the approach is rooted in taking a step backwards and nipping the problem in the bud by deepening our understanding of it, instead of designing redressal mechanisms to tackle it after the fact. It has been proven effective in helping a wide range of people build resilience to misleading information.

Prebunking is a psychological strategy for countering the effect of misinformation with the goal of assisting individuals in identifying and resisting deceptive content, hence increasing resilience against future misinformation. Online manipulation is a complex issue, and multiple approaches are needed to curb its worst effects. Prebunking provides an opportunity to get ahead of online manipulation, providing a layer of protection before individuals encounter malicious content. Prebunking aids individuals in discerning and refuting misleading arguments, thus enabling them to resist a variety of online manipulations. 

Prebunking builds mental defenses for misinformation by providing warnings and counterarguments before people encounter malicious content. Inoculating people against false or misleading information is a powerful and effective method for building trust and understanding along with a personal capacity for discernment and fact-checking. Prebunking teaches people how to separate facts from myths by teaching them the importance of thinking in terms of ‘how you know what you know’ and consensus-building. Prebunking uses examples and case studies to explain the types and risks of misinformation so that individuals can apply these learnings to reject false claims and manipulation in the future as well. 

How Prebunking Helps Individuals Spot Manipulative Messages

Prebunking helps individuals identify manipulative messages by providing them with the necessary tools and knowledge to recognize common techniques used to spread misinformation. Successful prebunking strategies include;

1. Warnings;
2. Preemptive Refutation: It explains the narrative/technique and how particular information is manipulative in structure. The Inoculation treatment messages typically include 2-3 counterarguments and their refutations. An effective rebuttal provides the viewer with skills to fight any erroneous or misleading information they may encounter in the future.
3. Micro-dosing: A weakened or practical example of misinformation that is innocuous. 

All these alert individuals to potential manipulation attempts. Prebunking also offers weakened examples of misinformation, allowing individuals to practice identifying deceptive content. It activates mental defenses, preparing individuals to resist persuasion attempts. Misinformation can exploit cognitive biases: people tend to put a lot of faith in things they’ve heard repeatedly - a fact that malicious actors manipulate by flooding the Internet with their claims to help legitimise them by creating familiarity. The ‘prebunking’ technique helps to create resilience against misinformation and protects our minds from the harmful effects of misinformation. 

Prebunking essentially helps people control the information they consume by teaching them how to discern between accurate and deceptive content. It enables one to develop critical thinking skills, evaluate sources adequately and identify red flags. By incorporating these components and strategies, prebunking enhances the ability to spot manipulative messages, resist deceptive narratives, and make informed decisions when navigating the very dynamic and complex information landscape online.

CyberPeace Policy Recommendations

• Preventing and fighting misinformation necessitates joint efforts between different stakeholders. The government and policymakers should sponsor prebunking initiatives and information literacy programmes to counter misinformation and adopt systematic approaches. Regulatory frameworks should encourage accountability in the dissemination of online information on various platforms. Collaboration with educational institutions, technological companies and civil society organisations can assist in the implementation of prebunking techniques in a variety of areas.
• Higher educational institutions should support prebunking and media literacy and offer professional development opportunities for educators, and scholars by working with academics and professionals on the subject of misinformation by producing research studies on the grey areas and challenges associated with misinformation.
• Technological companies and social media platforms should improve algorithm transparency, create user-friendly tools and resources, and work with fact-checking organisations to incorporate fact-check labels and tools.
• Civil society organisations and NGOs should promote digital literacy campaigns to spread awareness on misinformation and teach prebunking strategies and critical information evaluation. Training programmes should be available to help people recognise and resist deceptive information using prebunking tactics. Advocacy efforts should support legislation or guidelines that support and encourage prebunking efforts and promote media literacy as a basic skill in the digital landscape. 
• Media outlets and journalists including print & social media should follow high journalistic standards and engage in fact-checking activities to ensure information accuracy before release. Collaboration with prebunking professionals, cyber security experts, researchers and advocacy analysts can result in instructional content and initiatives that promote media literacy, prebunking strategies and misinformation awareness.

Final Words

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2024 identifies misinformation and disinformation as the top most significant risks for the next two years. Misinformation and disinformation are rampant in today’s digital-first reality, and the ever-growing popularity of social media is only going to see the challenges compound further. It is absolutely imperative for all netizens and stakeholders  to adopt proactive approaches to counter the growing problem of misinformation. Prebunking is a powerful problem-solving tool in this regard because it aims at ‘protection through prevention’ instead of limiting the strategy to harm reduction and redressal.  We can draw parallels with the concept of vaccination or inoculation, reducing the probability of a misinformation infection. Prebunking exposes us to a weakened form of misinformation and provides ways to identify it, reducing the chance false information takes root in our psyches.

The most compelling attribute of this approach is that the focus is not only on preventing damage but also creating widespread ownership and citizen participation in the problem-solving process. Every empowered individual creates an additional layer of protection against the scourge of misinformation, not only making safer choices for themselves but also lowering the risk of spreading false claims to others.  

References

• [1] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_2024.pdf
• [2] https://prebunking.withgoogle.com/docs/A_Practical_Guide_to_Prebunking_Misinformation.pdf
• [3] https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/17634/3565

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Introduction

National AVGC-XR stands for National Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics, and Extended Reality. On 21 Aug 2024 Shri Sanjay Jaju, Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Speaking at the 5th Global AVGC and Immersive Media Summit 2024,  announced that the National AVGC-XR Policy will be implemented soon. National AVGC-XR policy aims to facilitate investment, foster innovation, ensure skill development, protect intellectual property and help build world-class infrastructure. Additionally, Atul Kumar Tiwari, Secretary of Ministry of Skills and Entrepreneurship, said that the Centre's decision to revamp 1,000 ITIs is pivotal in aligning workforce skills with AVGC industry needs. He called for enhanced intellectual property rights to retain talent and content in India.

Key Highlights of National AVGC-XR Policy 

• The policy will be implemented in conjunction with the National AVGC-XR Mission to improve India's AVGC sectors through infrastructure development, skill enhancement, innovation, and regulatory support.
• The policy aims to improve India's international competitiveness in the AVGC industry, specifically by supporting the creation of unique intellectual properties (IPs) that can gain worldwide acclaim.
• The policy acknowledges the significance of adapting and converting content for various international viewers, which has become easier considering technological advancements.
• The government is dedicated to providing strong policies and financial backing to the AVGC industry, ensuring that India continues to be a worldwide leader in the sector.

Tech-driven trends in the AVGC-XR Sector promoting exponential growth

• Advancements in technology specifically when we talk about the Animation and VFX industry, emerging trends such as AR, VR, and real-time 3D technology, are driving the expansion of the metaverse, resulting in a rising need for fresh jobs and broadening uses beyond gaming into education, e-commerce, and entertainment. Moreover, the transition to cloud-oriented production processes and the increase in unique or original content on OTT platforms are improving cooperation and propelling industry growth. To drive expansion, global OTT leaders are commissioning more original content. This has increased the need for VFX, post-production, and animation services.
• Technological advancements in India's gaming industry, like cloud gaming, increased popularity of mobile gaming, the introduction of 5G and 6G, and recognition of e-gaming at national and international forums, are breaking down obstacles and fueling swift growth, positioning India as a key player in growing e-gaming sector worldwide. Furthermore, the integration of gamification and XR in education and training is generating immersive experiences that improve learning and skill building, contributing to the expansion of the AVGC-XR industry.
• The comics industry is being transformed by technological advancements like digital technology and self-publishing, which are increasing access and distribution through online platforms and social media. The rising popularity of graphic novels and the greater use of digital comics, particularly among young audiences with smartphones, are fueling substantial growth in the AVGC-XR industry.
• The use of AR, VR, and MR (Mixed Reality) technologies is rapidly growing due to tech-driven trends in Extended Reality (XR), transforming industries such as healthcare, education, and retail. The rising number of startups in this sector, boosted by higher venture capital funding, is speeding up the uptake of XR services, establishing it as a primary catalyst of innovation and expansion in various industries.

Final Words:

Just like the IT revolution, the Indian AVGC-XR industry along with technological trends and advancements has great potential. With the growth in various sectors within the AVGC industry, the right policy framework in place and government support, it will be forefront of India’s global standing in the AVGC sectoral growth including various Intellectual Property (IP), creations, and outsourcing services. The proposed AVGC-XR policy with a forward-thinking approach will drive the industry growth. Thus, a comprehensive integrated and collaborative approach is essential. Furthermore with rising trends in technological space including the use of AR, VR, cloud spaces, 6G and expansion of the OTT sector, the safe and secure use in terms of cybersecurity is encouraged to ultimately protect the interest of users and establish a safe secure cyber world driven by exponential growth in various sectors including AVGC. We’re at the cusp of a new era, where we’re looking at technological advancements not as a tool but as a way of life, hence safe and secure usage remains a top priority.

References: 

1. https://www.cii.in/PressreleasesDetail.aspx?enc=IkIXRoaDhS+jXtgjqb7UcbWSnaI7mgIS485nHsQEMbw
2. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/avgc-xr-policy-to-be-implemented-in-tandem-with-national-avgc-xr-mission-ib-secretary/article68550433.ece#:~:text=Speaking%20at%20the%20Fifth%20Global,competitiveness%20by%20fostering%20infrastructure%20development%2C
3. https://mib.gov.in/sites/default/files/Annexure%20C-AVGC-XR%20-%20Draft%20for%20National%20Policy_16th%20December%202022-AG%20EDIT.pdf
4. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/potential-of-india-s-avgc-xr-sector

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