E-Paper
Arabian boom spells doom
THE US $ 93 billion construction boom in Saudi Arabia is giving sleepless nights to the city?s real estate contractors.
THE US $ 93 billion construction boom in Saudi Arabia is giving sleepless nights to the city’s real estate contractors.
And how? During the past seven months thousands of skilled workers from eastern UP who awaited to be called for work at the upcoming projects of construction houses have either applied for a work visa or migrated altogether after finding jobs in Saudi cities.
Local passport authorities report that there were more number of passport application forms being sold currently than ever before in the entire state. On an average, the total number of passport applications being sold across the State have
doubled from 1,000 in 2004-05 to 2,500 per day in 2006-07, stated an official.
Anirudh Khaitan, a real estate consultant and managing director of Radico Khaitan Finance Ltd, told HT Lucknow Live that most of the real estate contractors who are lining up at his office to seek consultancy on design of projects want to know how to fill up the skills shortage in the real estate sector.
“The skills shortage in the real estate has reached formidable proportions in the country. It’s not just the Saudi construction boom but the real estate activity within the country is leading to massive demand for skilled workers,” he said.
There is already a huge cross-border migration of skilled workers with the country to from regions where the construction activity had reached a plateau to cities such as Lucknow where the real estate activity is about to pick up with large apartment projects lined up by the builders, Khaitan said.
Quite a major chunk of the skilled labour base in the National Capital Region (NCR) is now migrating to cities which are about to witness a construction boom, he said.
Real estate analysts in Lucknow said that a large base of skilled construction workers in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have moved north in Uttar Pradesh to work in new project sites.
