Manufacturing in the country won’t take off as soon as lockdown restrictions are lifted due to an acute shortage of workers who have returned to their home states, industrialists said.
Given the chaos that surrounded the exodus of workers from industrial clusters like the National Capital Region when the lockdown started on March 25, the concern is whether transportation facilities are adequate to allow all workers to travel back to the cities after the restrictions are eased.
Even if workers manage to move back to their workplaces, they may not be welcomed by their landlords due to fear psychosis, pointed out Sudhir Mutalik, managing director of Nashik-based Positive Metering Pumps.
Many of the migrant workers can’t be replaced by locals because of the skills they’ve picked up over the years doing specific jobs like turning and foundry-work.
Clothing manufacturers in the NCR anticipate a peculiar problem. Many of their workers were unable to go home and were stuck in the city. When the lockdown lifts, they are likely to go home, creating a worker shortage, said Gautam Nair, managing director of Matrix Clothing. About 80% of the 6,000 workers at Matrix’s five Gurgaon factories stayed back. From food products to electronics to cement and ceramics, nearly nine million jobs may be affected within the manufacturing space, owing to the plant shutdowns, according to the temporary staffing firm Adecco Group. The lockdown has brought manufacturing and production projects to a standstill.
For instance, the handset manufacturing industry is deep in losses at ₹15,000 crore because of production delays. “At present, we have a turnover of ₹500 crore to ₹700 crore per day. So, a shutdown for about three weeks essentially means a loss ranging between ₹10,000 crore and ₹15,000 crore,” Pankaj Mohindroo, chairman of the Indian Cellular & Electronic Association of India (ICEA) told ET. ICEA represents smartphone manufacturers including Apple, Oppo, Lava and more. Manufacturing and other core sectors of the economy such as power, infrastructure, mining, agriculture will be cautious in hiring. They are all impacted by the disruption in supply chains. Focus of these organisations will now be on bringing the business to normalcy,” said Aditya Narayan Mishra the Director and CEO of CIEL HR Services.
“Most of these losses will be in the informal economy of jobs such as tour operators, drivers, guides, billing, customer service, operations and micro retailers. For formal sector (organised sector), employees with PF and other such benefits would also be impacted. Similarly, manufacturing, engineering, construction will shrink by about 70,000 jobs including the people working in unorganised sectors from April-June. Due to the lockdown in a huge number of districts, lakhs of people are losing their daily wages. The recovery is expected in July-Dec 2020,” added Mishra.
“This pandemic has shown us that they are key elements of our ecosystem,” Mahindra said on Twitter on Wednesday. “We never paid them much attention; we now need to respect them as key support pillars of society.”
To get outstation workers to return, there should be an aggressive messaging campaign on the preparedness of the government and the industry to re-start, suggested Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry.
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