Slowing workforce migration a worry for the industry: L&T’s SN Subrahmanyan

Lesser people are migrating for work and the slowing labour migration in the country is one of our biggest worries today, SN Subrahmanyan, Chairman and Managing Director of infrastructure major Larsen & Toubro said while speaking at CII’s Mystic South Global Linkages Summit 2025 in Chennai on Tuesday.

“As an organisation, we employ about 2,50,000 staff and 4,00,000 labourers at any given point of time. While attrition among staff does bother me, I am more worried about the availability of labourers today,” he added.

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He explained that L&T has a standardised method for labour mobilisation including a dedicated HR team for labour where he is closely involved. “But there is difficulty despite this because labour is not willing to move for opportunities… Maybe their local economy is doing well, maybe it is due to the various government schemes & DBTs available to them, but they are not willing to move.”

The unwillingness to move for jobs is also being felt in engineers and other white-collar workforce. He reminisced “When I joined L&T as a graduate engineer, my boss said if you are from Chennai, you go to Delhi and work. But today, if I ask a person from Chennai to work out of Delhi, he says bye. It’s a different world of work today and we have to see how to make HR policies flexible.”

He described this as a challenge in the company’s efforts to ‘build the nation’s infrastructure.’

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On addressing these issues, he mentioned L&T is trying to tackle the issue by setting up skill training institutes and also tapping into technology. In the case of Artificial Intelligence (AI), around 100 algorithms have been written by teams in our main infrastructure business, he noted.

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He also gave examples of their experiments with new technology to tackle the issue, “3D printed buildings are still costly when seen at a rate per square foot, but if labor is getting difficult, maybe sometime in the future, we have to live with this.”