Slowing Workforce Migration a Cause of Concern: L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan

SN Subrahmanyan, Chairman and Managing Director of Larsen & Toubro said today that less people are migrating for work and slowing migration among laborers are among major issues affecting the industry.

While speaking at CII’s Mystic South Global Linkages Summit 2025 in Chennai, Subrahmanyan recalled, “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 clarified that the engineering major follows a standardised method to mobilise labourers, wherein he directly intervenes with the HR team. He said, “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.”

He remembers, “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 mentioned that L&T is trying to tackle the issue by setting up skill training institutes and tapping into technology. In Artificial Intelligence, close to 100 algorithms have been written by teams in our main infrastructure business.

He said, “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.”

Slowing Workforce Migration a Cause of Concern: L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan