Many small companies especially in the construction industry in Tamil Nadu who rely heavily on migrant workers for unskilled work due to cheap labour cost are having a tough time now. Thousands of workers who went home when the Coronavirus started to spread from April last year have not returned to work. This has forced companies to hire local people with a 20-30 per cent premium.

In fact, some of the local tea stalls, grocery shops and textile stores that employed migrant workers are also affected. Now, the locals demand a premium, hurting the small employers.

Many of the migrant workers are upset as they were not taken care by their owners well during the pandemic, and were left to fend for themselves, said an owner of a grocery shop in Triplicane, Chennai, who used to employ six persons from Bihar. None of them returned, he added.

According to S Muralidharan, a building contractor in Srirangam, employees from Bihar did not return to work, forcing him to pay 20-30 per cent more for hiring locally. A maistry (head workman) is now paid ₹800 per day as against ₹700 before the pandemic, and a sithal (helper) is paid ₹500 as against ₹400. The construction cost will go up accordingly, he said.

Agreeing with Muralidharan, Dharmarajan, a building contractor in Oragadam said that he is also facing a similar situation in the highly industrial zone. “We have been trying to reach out to workers to return. However, most of their mobile phones are either switched off or they don’t reply,” he added.

Sensing that he could also face a similar issue, P Mathan of Agrogreen Resources India, an exporter of agro products such as onions and chilli employing over a dozen employees from Bihar, spent ₹1.5 lakh in flight tickets to bring back his employees. “When the pandemic struck, we sent them in a van from Chennai and told them not to return till the situation calms down. They returned in November by flight via Pune,” said Mathan, who has a large warehouse in the city outskirts of Red Hills.

Commenting on the issue, Prashant Thakur, Director & Head – Research, ANAROCK Property Consultants, there may be exceptions but certainly, it is not the overall trend. A majority of migrant workers who left cities and went back to their hometowns during the lockdown are now back in the cities. In the construction activity at the project sites across cities, it has easily resumed to more than 80 per cent of the pre-Covid-19 levels. In some projects, particularly by large developers, it has even reached pre-Covid-19 levels.

In fiscal 2020, data indicated that the total workforce in real estate (both skilled and unskilled) was around 60 million. Of this, 90 per cent or 54 million were engaged in construction or building activity. Nearly 80 per cent of this 54 million (which is about 44 million) were unskilled labourers. Of the total unskilled labourers (44 million), at least 80 per cent were migrant workers, he said.

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