Larsen & Toubro (L&T) chairman and managing director SN Subrahmanyan on Tuesday highlighted a severe labour shortage in India’s construction sector, attributing it to workers’ reluctance to migrate to other cities.
Speaking at the CII South Global Linkages summit in Chennai, he pointed out that while many parts of the world experience heavy migration, India faces the opposite challenge. “Labourers are unwilling to move for work due to comfort factors and the availability of various welfare schemes,” he said.
“And that is worrying us because as an organisation, we employ 230,000 staff and more than 400,000 labourers at any given point of time,” Subrahmanyan said, adding that labour attrition is three to four times a year. “That means, despite employing 400,000 labourers, we actually end up hiring about 1.6 million annually.”
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To manage this, L&T maintains a database of four million workers, tracking details such as their names, Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar numbers, villages and skill sets. “Whenever work commences on a new site and we need a carpenter, we can just send a message and get them to work in whichever location,” he explained. “But at the same time, imagine having to mobilise 1.6 million people every year.”
The challenge has grown so severe that L&T has created a dedicated ‘HR for Labour’ department—a first for the company. “Sometimes I even sit on that,” he stated.
Citing a current example, he revealed that L&T needs to mobilise 50,000 labourers for a major industrial conglomerate in Western India. “That’s the scale of things happening. We need people, but they are not willing to come because of various reasons,” he said, pointing to factors such as Jan Dhan accounts and direct benefit transfers.
“Maybe the economy is doing well, so you get jobs where you are,” he added, referencing government schemes like Garib Kalyan Yojana and MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). “Therefore, people are not willing to travel all the way from Muzaffarabad to Mumbai to work.”
Subrahmanyan underscored how this labour crunch is affecting crucial infrastructure projects.
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