It was one of those dry, blistering June mornings in Chennai — the kind where the heat clings to your skin even in the shade, and the trees stand stunned into silence. The pavement outside a tea stall near Royapettah shimmered with that familiar summer daze, and an auto driver leaned against his seat, idly thumbing through his phone while sweat trickled down his temples.
Someone muttered, “Now even the billing machine talks back in English… Enga velai pogudhu?”
(Where are our jobs going?)
That passing remark, almost comical on the surface, carried an inevitable quiet panic — the kind we’re not ready to name yet.
1. Displacement Without Departure
As we approach June 20, World Refugee Day, we usually picture people with backpacks at borders, crossing rivers and fences. But another kind of refugee is emerging here — not from war zones, but data zones. Not from bombed-out towns, but from cubicles, classrooms, and call centres. Not always fleeing — but slowly fading.
They haven’t crossed state lines. They haven’t left their homes in Kodambakkam or Thiruvanmiyur. But they’ve been displaced all the same — by AI, automation, and something more invisible: irrelevance.
Meet the digital refugee.
2. The Man Who Disappeared Without Moving
There’s Kumar, a soft-spoken man from T. Nagar. For 18 years, he managed inventory at a mid-sized warehouse near Guindy. He could read supply chains like other men read horoscopes — just by glancing at the ledgers, he’d know when the rice bags were low or if the lorry had been delayed on the highway from Madurai.
Then the company got an “AI supply optimisation software.” Kumar trained it himself. It was meant to help him. Two weeks later, they let him go.
“I didn’t even know what to tell my amma,” he told me. “I didn’t make a mistake. I just… became extra.”
He’s not alone. Thousands of Kumars—men and women—are slowly being nudged out by technology that doesn’t hate them; it just doesn’t need them.
3. They’re Not Called Refugees, But They Feel the Same
A refugee isn’t just someone who’s lost their land — it’s someone who’s lost their belonging. For digital refugees, the loss is more abstract:
• A job title erased overnight.
• A desk no longer theirs.
• A purpose that dried up, like a Chennai Lake in May.
While the world celebrates “smart systems” and “intelligent automation,” these souls stand on the periphery—jobless, skillless, and voiceless.
But they still queue at the TASMAC bar on weekends, visit the temple tank hoping for divine intercession, and smile at their children, unsure if they’re smiling at a future they understand.
4. The Anger Builds in Silence
Not all storms are loud. Some build like a Chennai summer — dry, sticky, and unbearable.
We’re seeing it already:
• Delivery drivers who punch the air when the app downgrades their rating.
• Graphic designers in Mylapore whose clients now use DALL·E.
• AI tutoring apps are replacing schoolteachers with charming, mechanical voices.
They don’t riot. Not yet.
But anger is fermenting, not flashing.
History has shown us that when enough people feel invisible, they make themselves unmissable.
5. The Myth That AI Only Replaces Manual Jobs
Let’s not fool ourselves. It isn’t just factory workers being replaced. It’s also:
• Journalists whose articles are now drafted by language models.
• Junior lawyers are outmanoeuvred by AI that digests case law in seconds.
• Doctors are aided — and sometimes overridden — by machine diagnosis.
The panic isn’t just at the bottom in Chennai’s new IT corridors — from Perungudi to Sholinganallur. Even mid-level managers are whispering over lunch: “I saw my role being tested by a bot in last week’s report…”
We thought education would save us. Now, even that is under siege.
6. The Speed Is the Real Killer
When the steam engine came, farmers became factory workers. When the computer came, typists became coders. But this AI wave is not giving us time to transform—it’s transporting us straight to obsolescence.
You don’t retrain a 47-year-old clerk in Villivakkam overnight. You can’t teach a weaver in Kancheepuram how to prompt-engineer a midjourney art bot. But the world is not waiting. It is upgrading ruthlessly. Human dignity is often left behind in that rush, like an old umbrella forgotten in a shared auto.
7. Chennai’s Unique Vulnerability
With its buzzing IT parks, BPOS, and engineering colleges, our beloved Chennai is poised on a knife’s edge.
• Our youth are tech-savvy but not future-ready.
• Our industries rely on human outsourcing, but what happens when clients outsource to algorithms instead?
• Our education system still teaches memory and obedience over creativity and emotional intelligence — the things AI can’t replicate.
We may be sitting on a ticking bomb. But it doesn’t tick loudly. It hums — like a server farm in the night.
8. The Invisible Displacement
The danger is — you can’t always see it.
There’s no refugee camp in Royapuram. No banners. No UNHCR tents.
But there are signs:
• Skilled people taking unskilled jobs.
• Engineers are becoming gig delivery riders.
• A rise in alcohol abuse, anxiety, and quiet desperation.
• Families avoid dinner conversations because the topic of “job” brings silence.
This is the refugee without a border, the homelessness of the mind.
9. What Can Be Done?
We cannot stop AI—nor should we—but we can humanise our transition.
Nine things we must do:
1. Create mass retraining missions, especially in Tamil Nadu’s small towns and panchayats.
2. Tax AI output and reinvest it in human employment.
3. Encourage empathy-driven careers: care work, arts, human-led counselling.
4. Provide mental health support for the displaced.
5. Recognise digital displacement as a policy issue, not just an HR inconvenience.
6. Empower schools to teach adaptability, not just algebra.
7. Protect gig workers with rights and insurance.
8. Build a Chennai AI Transition Task Force to guide this delicate transformation.
9. Most importantly: restore dignity — not with speeches, but with action.
10. A different kind of Refuge
I once asked an old fisherman in Ennore how he knew where to cast his net.
“Pasangal ellam GPS use panradhu… naan kaathu paarthuduvan.”
(The boys use GPS. I watch the wind.)
Maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten — the instinct, the stillness, the listening.
AI is fast. But humans? We feel, imagine, love, mess up, and laugh.
Let us not measure people only by productivity. Let us measure them by their capacity to imagine beauty, carry loss with grace, and offer a child hope.
11. A Final Word, Beneath a Rain Tree
I’m sitting under a rain tree in Egmore, watching an old security guard trying to unlock his smartphone with a thumb that the screen won’t recognise.
There is poetry in that. The digital world will keep expanding — faster, cheaper, smarter. But if we don’t find space in it for the slow, analogue, and human, we’ll create a dazzling… and desolate future. So, this World Refugee Day, let’s look around.
You might not see tents or border fences. But look closer — You might see the first wave of digital refugees, right there at the tea kadai, scrolling, searching, waiting — not for sympathy, but for a second chance.
– Dr. K. Jayanth Murali is a retired DGP, ultramarathoner, and seeker of truth in law enforcement and life. His latest works explore the sacred junction between technology, consciousness, and justice. He still believes in handwritten letters, filter coffee, and the quiet power of Chennai’s mornings.