The Hindu Business Line : Manpower shortage in Tiruchi engg units

The Rs 5,000-crore Tiruchi engineering industry is faced with its biggest ever problem — manpower shortage. The region is ready to hire 8,000 people, only there are no people to hire.

They make boilers for power plants, boiler parts, windmill towers and an assortment of pipes and panels in Tiruchi. All this involves one basic task — shape metal. For this you need people to cut, weld, grind and paint. In thousands.

BHEL, the public sector giant, accounts for nearly three-fourths of the turnover of engineering industry in Tiruchi. The company sees a need for 500 more shop-floor workers and, head office willing, it will find no problem in getting them.

But for the 300-odd metal fabricators, meeting the growing demand for workers is not so easy. Their business is booming. Last year, they processed 1.5 lakh tonnes of steel and this year, they expect to do around 2.25 lakh tonnes.

"We are going to get 100-200 people from Bihar," says Mr Rajappa Rajkumar, President, BHEL Small-Scale Industries Association (BHELSSIA).

Why Bihar? They are migrant, they work well. Give them a place to live and they will work for you. That has been the experience of G.B. Engineering Enterprise Pvt Ltd, which has some 25 Rajasthani workers on its premises and plans to hire more.

Mr B. Pattabhiraman, Managing Director, G.B. Engineering, says that these workers do not work fixed hours. Starting from 5.30 a.m., they work and rest alternately.

Many units are likely to follow G.B. Engineering's example of getting people from other parts of the country.

Mr Pattabhiraman has begun another experiment. If you want to see a woman-welder, you should go to G.B. Engineering. "It is just a week since we got a bunch of women working in the shop-floors," he told Business Line. "We will have to see how it goes."

So far, it has gone on well. Apart from asking them to go home by 7 p.m., G.B. Engineering has found no issues in employing shop floor labour from the gentler sex.

Talk of labour shortage always throws up some questions. How much do the workers earn? Is a compensation hike a solution?

In Tiruchi, after a year's training, a worker earns about Rs 5,000 a month. Units in the region are not inclined to view this as a small number. Instead, they see it as a sort of stipend.

This is how it works in Tiruchi. An unskilled man joins a company and for a year gets between Rs 2,500 and Rs 3,000 a month. For the next two years, he gets between Rs 5,000 and Rs 7,000. And then, he is gone — to a big company if not to the.West Asia.

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