Hyderabad, June 15
If you see a group of Chinese nationals laying a telecom cable or working on road-widening, don’t be surprised.
Of late, the construction boom in India is luring skilled and semi-skilled construction workers from China.
They are already working in some pockets of the country including Andhra Pradesh and Bihar and there could be more in north and eastern India, according to the information available with the National Academy of Construction (NAC) here.
“We were quite surprised when we came to know that Chinese workers are coming to India. There are also requests that some of them should be trained at our academy,” Mr V. Prabhu, Additional Director General, NAC, told Business Line here.
The Chinese workers are being brought to India by overseas labour contractors in teams and about 300 of them are working in some parts of Andhra Pradesh on cable-laying for a private telecom company.
“They are brought to India on the promise of providing food and shelter for a fixed period of time and wages do not differ much from their Indian counterparts (Rs 150-200 a day),” Mr Prabhu said.
“The mismatch between the demand and supply of the construction workers in different parts of the country and the seasonal unemployment in China could be behind the presence of Chinese workers in India,” he added.
What brings the Chinese workers to India is their experience in infrastructure works, according to an official of Reliance Industries Ltd which currently employs over 1,000 Chinese in its 1,440-km East West Gas Pipeline (from Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh to Baruch in Gujarat) project.
“We have over 1,000 Chinese working at different levels from manual labour to entry level technical supervisors. They have experience in grounding mega infrastructure projects,” the RIL official said.
While Chinese presence in India in other sectors is not unknown, their entry as workers into the construction industry signals a serious shortage in the domestic market, said Mr S. Chandrasekhar, Director, International Infrastructure Consultants Pvt Ltd, Chennai.
As most of the Indian manual workers display unwillingness to migrate to other parts from their place, training institutes should be set up across the country to train and create awareness among them, he said.
