GEM Engserv Pvt. Ltd is an ISO 9001:2015 certified organization, certified by TUV India in accreditation with National Accreditation Board for Certification Bodies (NABCB).
GEM Engserv Pvt. Ltd is an ISO 9001:2015 certified organization, certified by TUV India in accreditation with National Accreditation Board for Certification Bodies (NABCB).
The Premise
In a world that is increasingly focusing on artificial intelligence, agents and automation, there is at least one sector unique in the way it interfaces with technological advances. Even though several organizations are waking up to the fact that AI is a tool to leverage and offers competitive advantage, we are still only scratching the surface with transactional use cases rather a Command-and-Control Center that can govern the tactical and operational decision making on a construction project site. Decisions are still very much driven by humans and taken based on fragmented subjective inputs, gut feeling and interpersonal relationships.
However, herein lies the problem that we are facing but not realizing and certainly not tackling as seriously as we should. The talent pool has drastically shrunk vis-à-vis the demand or the quantum of work that is currently being handled in real estate.
Industry veterans have recently started sounding the alarm, corroborating what we have been facing increasingly day after day. The champion of Mumbai’s real estate, Mr. Niranjan Hiranandani, speaking at a public event in August 2025 mentioned that the construction industry (in India) is currently short of 2 million skilled workers. Further, he added, that this gap might grow to 5 million in a span of 5 years. Sure, he was speaking about infra as well as real estate sectors combined but both sectors are interrelated and we often see workforce moving between the two driven by demand.
A similar claim was made by L&T’s Chairman, Mr. S.N. Subrahmanyan who stated last year that their construction business alone was facing a shortage of 25,000 workers.
The numbers sound unbelievable and offer a terrible prognosis for the industry. It sounds like this would bring the industry to a halt. However, the truth is that all organizations and projects are performing sub-optimally as a result of this deficit.
Another dimension of the challenge that we face is the mismatch in skillset which is required in the industry. A report jointly published by Knight Frank and RICS back in 2023 estimated that the total construction workforce back in that year was 71 million. However, around 80% of this workforce would be considered unskilled or semi-skilled. Further complicating this fact is that technicians, foremen and engineers formed just about 8% of the total workforce (~ 6 million) which means that we don’t even have sufficient technically trained workforce for oversight and monitoring as a layer over the actual workforce.
The same report projects that the construction industry will require around 9 million engineers, technicians and foremen to be able to handle the construction industry’s demand. However, AICTE data showed an enrollment of just 1.7 Lakh students in Civil Engineering in the year 2024-25 and industry benchmarks indicate that only about 50% of the graduates opt for core construction jobs at graduation.
Digging a little deeper, we see this challenge manifest in another form when it comes to project management capabilities as well. We have observed that the largest gap in resource availability is in niche areas related to project management such as the planning and project controls, commercial management and contracts administration, as well as quality management domains which form the layer that is essential to ensure project performance in terms of time and cost.
The major reasons for project delays have transformed over the past 5 years. Most project owners now worry more about deployment challenges rather than regulatory approvals and while material shortage has also intermittently been a major cause for concern, manpower has created bottlenecks across the board.
The impact spans all dimensions on which a project is measured – time, cost, quality as well as safety – all of which eventually translate to the bottom line that the project is able to maintain.
Unfortunately, the industry has dealt with this challenge poorly and we have been reactive in our approach. The traditional, short-sighted view has attempted to retain or acquire manpower at the cost of another player within the industry instead of trying to work towards growing the source itself.
The industry needs to move from a cut-throat, highest bidder attitude for the workforce to a planned approach for projects and also come together to implement certain game-changing initiatives that can derive from output from the existing talent pool. Some ideas are presented below, but certainly this is just scratching the surface.
Project owners do a reasonably good job of planning for material as well as plant and machinery. However, this discipline is not followed when it comes to manpower. There is hardly a project which builds a resource loaded scheduled at the initiation stage. Scientific forecasting, skill identification and a flexible resourcing approach may help.
Additionally, performance of a project should be measured and closely linked to the performance of deployed manpower, with an opportunity to upskill and enhance productivity where needed.
NICMAR’s origin story points to a time with a similar challenge when industry stalwarts came together to champion the cause of upskilling. We need similar intervention and some thought leaders would do well to create a focus group to attack the problem at origin i.e. educational institutes.
This is an area which is largely missing from the industry, compared to other sectors such as IT, pharma and manufacturing. Given that human resource is the bottleneck we are trying to resolve, the HR function (as well as Learning and Development) would need to play a crucial role in managing the working conditions, growth, welfare and training of manpower within organizations.
Finally, an unconventional recommendation. It is a common myth that the industry requires only civil engineers to form the workforce. Is it too far-fetched to think of pulling in workforce from other educational backgrounds and deploy them on construction projects with highly focused and specialized training intervention? Desperate times call of desperate measures.
The construction industry has invested considerably in improvement of construction techniques, equipment and digitization. However, all of these investments eventually depend upon people for their effective implementation. The next big win for the industry might therefore come from how we plan, develop and deploy its people.