Reluctance of workers to relocate poses a challenge: L&T MD SN Subrahmanyan

SN Subrahmanyan, chairman and managing director of Larsen and Toubro on Tuesday said construction labourers are not willing to work due to availability of welfare schemes and comfort. Referring to the labour shortages in the construction industry, he said while the rest of the world grapples with large numbers of migration, India has a peculiar problem of people unwilling to move to work. He said that for the nation to grow, building infrastructure like roads and power plants is key but getting difficult because of labour shortage.

Speaking at the CII South Global Linkages summit in Chennai, he said, “We have to employ 4 lakh laborers and the attrition rate is three to four times a year, so for employing 4 lakh laborers we employ about 6 million,” he said. He further said the method of labour mobilisation has changed a lot. To get carpenters for a new site, the company sends messages to the list of carpenters it’s working or had worked in the past, he said, adding, the workers decide whether to take the job or not. “That is a method of mobilization. But at the same time imagine now to mobilise 1.6 million people every year. So we have created a separate department called HR for Labor which does not exist in the company but it does exist. And sometimes I even sit on that,” he said. People are not willing to come for various reasons, because of the bank accounts (Jan Dhan), the direct benefit transfers, Garib Kalyan Yojana, the MGNREGA schemes and not wanting to move from rural places preferring comfort, he said.

SN Subrahmanyan said a similar issue is faced in the engineering roles where graduates are unwilling to relocate. “When I joined L&T in 1983, my boss said, if you are from Chennai, you go to Delhi and work. Today if I take a guy from Chennai and tell him to go to Delhi and work, he says bye,” he said, adding that is more prevalent in the information technology sector where employees are unwilling to work from the office and older generations struggle to understand it. “If you tell him (IT employee) to come to the office and work, he says bye. And that’s a different world altogether. Therefore, it is a funny world which we are trying to live in and many of us wearing slightly more white hair are trying to understand it. We have to see how to live with this world and have policies which are flexible to understand all this and take it forward,” he said. Subrahmanyan said human migration, tech transition, energy transition and sustainability as key developments shaping the world.