The Hindu Business Line : `IT sector luring tech manpower from manufacturing'

The manufacturing industry is deprived of technology manpower as the IT sector lures them away. The situation arising out of shortage of skilled manpower is acutely felt across the country by the production industry.

"It is not only my company, but the entire manufacturing and infrastructure industry is facing this problem as the vital engineering and technology manpower is going away to do programming for the IT industry," said Mr A.M. Naik, Chairman and Managing Director of Larsen & Toubro.

Talking to Business Line, Mr Naik said the allurement of engineering, technology talent by the IT has led to value loss to the country's manufacturing industry.

Value addition

Mr Naik's argument is that one would have done a value addition of 4 or 5 per cent in a product cycle done with the use of engineering and IT; whereas had one done the engineering and manufacture, the accrued value addition to the manufacture would be 50- 60 per cent. To drive home this point, the L&T Chairman points out the instances of the multinational companies that come to India to do the designs set by the India's talented engineers and then take them to China to have them manufactured there before they are shipped to the Europe or the American markets.

"This way, in a cost of Rs 100, the country stands to benefit just Rs 4 or 5 for which the most intellectual brains would be used out. Whereas China, which does the manufacturing, gets at least 50 per cent of the value. The remaining 40 per cent value is obtained in the market place," opines Mr Naik.

Industrial manpower planning needs to be balanced out if India has to harness its manufacturing/technology resources. To strike a balance in the manpower demands between IT and the manufacturing/infrastructure sectors, Mr Naik suggested that while those who have studied in computer science/computer engineering should take up management positions in IT, and ordinary graduates be given training in programming so that the engineering graduates of different streams such as mechanical, electrical, civil or metallurgy could be allowed to do the domain work.

The deprivation of the skilled workers for the manufacturing sector is so severe that efforts on the part of individual engineering companies such as L &T on manpower planning will only have limited impact, he says.

Companies such as L&T will have to do a lot of convincing on young graduates to come to mainstream manufacturing, partly by compensating and partly by building exciting career for them. "A lot of role-models are needed to be built to get the young talents back to the manufacturing sector," said Mr Naik.