Coronavirus: Companies go all out to get back migrant workers

Wed Jun 24 04:00:00 IST 2020

MUMBAI: After the exodus, it’s now the return of the migrant workers . They made a difficult trek back home during the lockdown as factories downed shutters without any warning. But organizations are now rolling out the red carpet to get them back to work.

Companies are using a combination of measures — right from convincing village heads and the workers themselves of their safety, to arranging for their transportation — to bring them back from various states.

Hiring agencies TOI spoke to said that with limited sources of income back home, a number of workers had themselves evinced an interest to return to the workplace.

Faced with labour shortages over the last three months, a Mumbai-based pharma company with plants in the Western belt organized buses to get its employees back. Many of these are working in key functions of research and development.

Since pharmaceuticals fall under essential services, drug manufacturing plants were operational during the lockdown imposed due to Covid-19 . Units located at Baddi (Himachal Pradesh), Indore (Madhya Pradesh), and western belt of Vapi (Gujarat) and Daman were particularly hit by labour woes. Coupled with shortage of raw materials, packaging materials and logistics, average capacity utilization at pharma manufacturing plants across the country was affected by 40-50%. Now, it has limped back to near-normal levels, and is around 80% in most units, with the labour issue getting sorted.

RPG group company KEC International, where half of its migrant workers had left for their hometowns, has seen a significant number returning to the project sites. KEC International MD & CEO Vimal Kejriwal said, “Pre-lockdown, we had 30,000 people at various sites. This had come down to 15,000 during the lockdown. Now, we have crossed 20,000. In a way, two-thirds of our workers are back with the company. While we can’t say whether we will return to 30,000 workers in a couple of months, we are definitely receiving feelers from a lot who want to come back.”

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KEC International tapped into its employee database, engaged with supervisors who handled workers and the sarpanch at villages to reiterate that the workers and their safety will be taken care of on their return. “We are making arrangements to bring them back, whether it’s buses or arranging for their trains tickets. For some locations, we are even considering getting them by flights,” said Kejriwal. In addition, the company has also hired locally to ensure operations are not hampered. Kejriwal said 95% of the company’s sites are now operational.

JSW Cement also arranged for transportation in mid-May to get a few groups of employees for some of its plants after getting the relevant permissions from local administration. Its plants are located in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa, Maharashtra and West Bengal. However, as part of its risk-mitigation strategy, JSW Cement has now decided to employ a greater portion of local labour for its packing operations. At present, migrant workers account for 80% of loading and packing operations in a cement plant, while the rest is local labour. “We want to change the proportion to 80% local labour at our loading and packing facilities,” JSW Cement CEO Nilesh Narwekar said. “With 70-80% labour at the packing operations, we can run the plant without any hiccups in any crisis, going forward,” he added. Typically, 90-130 people are employed in each plant for packing operations. Most of them, employed as contract labour, left for their homes in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa and Rajasthan.

On the other hand, to ensure that essential commodities reach consumers across the country during this pandemic, ITC went through an extensive process of mobilizing the entire supply chain. “There were instances where we had to convince villagers that our facilities adhere to the highest levels of safety norms. We created awareness through videos, demonstrated our safety precautions by bringing people to our facilities and gave them the confidence required to repose faith in our operations,” said an ITC spokesperson. Today, the whole supply chain of ITC is running end-to-end. “Inter-district movement was a challenge. We had to relocate people to a district, help them stay there, find accommodation within that district so that we could manage workforce requirements,” said the spokesperson.

Dabur India, too, has recruited workers from villages and towns in the areas near its manufacturing units. Executive director Biplab Baksi said, “Wherever we are facing a shortage, we have sought and received permissions from state authorities to hire workers from other states. We have gone to states like Jharkhand to hire workers and have arranged transportation for them to reach our manufacturing units. All safety protocols mandated by each state, like social distancing, etc, are being followed during the transportation, and once they reach our manufacturing units.”

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