Larsen & Toubro's chairman S N Subrahmanyan
Credit: L&T website
Chennai: Larsen and Toubro (L&T) chief S N Subrahmanyan on Tuesday said companies are struggling to mobilise labourers for construction work as they are not willing to migrate for a slew of reasons, including welfare schemes that give them comfort in their native towns and villages.
Subrahmanyan, who recently faced flak from various quarters including from fellow industrialists for advocating a 90-hour work week, said labourers unwilling to migrate is a problem that is peculiar to India while contending that migration happens in large numbers in the rest of the world.
In his speech at the CII South Global Linkages summit here, the L&T boss said his company needs 4 lakh labourers a year to work in its construction projects but employs about 16 lakh people due to massive attrition rate in the sector.
There are various reasons for the attrition rate among the labourers, he said, and cited Jan Dhan bank account, various Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes, Garib Kalyan Yojana, and the MGNREGA scheme as examples. “…(labourers) don’t want to move from rural places preferring comfort,” Subrahmanyam added.
The L&T chief said companies struggle to mobilize construction labourers and carpenters across the country, while noting that L&T has created a new department to manage labourers.
He also said not just the construction sector, many sectors in the engineering side also face the same problem with working professionals unwilling to relocate and recalled his boss telling him in 1983 when he joined the company to relocate to New Delhi from Chennai.
“But today If I recruit a person from Chennai and ask him to work in Delhi, he says bye,” Subrahmanyam said, adding that such a trend is highly prevalent in the IT sector. He also stressed the need to focus on infrastructure development in India but regretted that adequate labour force wasn’t available to cater to the requirements.
Talking about booming opportunities for Indian companies in the Middle East, Subrahmanyan said workers prefer jobs in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar, where salaries are higher than in India.