Construction sector short of 10 mn staff

The construction sector is facing labour shortage of around 10 million persons in any given day and the situation will worsen in next decade when requirement for workers is expected to go up three-fold, realtors' body Credai said on Tuesday.

"The total requirement of skilled and unskilled labourers in the construction sector, including real estate, is 33 million per day.

"The shortage is about 30 per cent. We need to take proper measures so that things do not worsen next decade when per day labour requirement will treble," Credai's president Santosh Rungta told PTI.

Increase in income from agriculture and growth in overall rural economy coupled with huge migration of labourers to the Gulf countries are impacting the steady flow of masons, plumbers, electricians and other skilled and unskilled job workers in the construction sector.

Rungta said that the industry should gear up now on to mitigate the challenge, which could be compensated with the adaptation of latest technologies for construction.

"Technology is the need of the hour. We are not using the technology compared to the developers in developed nations.

"Developers here are a bit reluctant as technology usage will increase their cost of capital, which they will not consider a good idea since 90 per cent of our housing requirement is from the low-cost segments," he said.

However, as a fall out, a day may come when various parts of a building may be manufactured in a factory and a project will be assembled at the site, making the workforce constraint a non-issue, Rungta anticipates.

"The existing scenario of less availability of workforce may also provide a room for the growth of the pre-engineered buildings.

"This is already being used in the high-end housing projects and commercial buildings. The usage will only grow with time," he said.