December 21, 2013
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A method of ADDING VALUE RANJANI GOVIND
BCIL’s skill-development-programme is not confined merely to the refining of labour skills, but to supervision and monitoring with parameters for quality that are measurable, says Chandrashekar Hariharan in an interview with RANJANI GOVIND Bangalore-based builder Biodiversity Conservation India Ltd (BCIL) initiated the much-required ‘skills development programme’ last week, a training that would help mould constructions workers into getting ‘more value’ with their deft hands at work. This in-company training would be carried out with the help of informed and conversant men in the field through its non-profit arm Alternative tech Foundation, launched on December 14, the National Energy Conservation Day. Says BCIL’s Chairman, Chandrashekar Hariharan, “A cursory glance at construction sites shows glaring gaps in the skills of construction workers, as it is a commentary and exhibit of ‘very little knowledge’ of what they do. According to the statistics of National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), the bulk of the workforce in the country at around 82% constitutes unskilled workforce, 10% skilled workforce and the rest making up the engineers, technicians, foremen and clerical staff.” How far would proposals as the ‘skills development programme’ address the shortfalls of the construction sector, in terms of quantity and quality? The Hindu-HABITAT spoke to Chandrashekar Hariharan on these points. Some excerpts…. Why do you think India requires a skill development programme in the construction sector? If this were 2030, 60 per cent of the buildings that would exist would not even have been in the eye of an architect or promoter in 2013! The 250 per cent jump between now and end of the third decade requires explosive change in the way we build and in the skills that the traditional construction sector has evolved so far. The building systems continue to be what we have had for the last 100 years-plus. There has been no innovation. The skills that are needed are offered by thousands of workers who stream in from the drought-prone districts of India into cities that offer such work opportunity for farm hands. The construction sector is by far the largest employer today, secondly only to tourism. For every million rupees the construction sector employs as many as 50 people upstream and downstream the vendor
chain. Skills range from pure construction skills to finishing skills on work ethic as well as on the quality of finishes they will offer. India traditionally—until about 100 years has been known for its superior finishes and skills in buildings that have endured Centuries. Conspicuously in the last 20 years we have seen a steady dismantling of all such traditional knowledge with buildings that use brick and mortar and concrete roofs that are clunky and extremely labour-intensive. There is an array of nearly 30 skill sets ranging from roofing systems to block masonry to floor laying to completion of washrooms and stonemasonry, among many others, that need training, continuous improvement, systems and process and standard operating procedures. So the training is not confined merely to the refining of skills, but to supervision, monitoring, and measuring with parameters for quality that are measurable. Improving knowledge of workers for bringing in acceptable quality or is the training for making construction sites a safer place? It is a combination. We have to remember that nearly all our construction workers have no formal training in the ways that we know ‘education’ in the middle class which is completely divorced from learning with our hands. These workers have no schooling in their formative years that the ‘educated’ middle class has. They have no discipline therefore of learning mentally, with understanding of concepts and ideas. Their hands are their gateway to their mind. We have to therefore recognize how master carpenters and master masons in various disciplines are picked in a way that there is social, behavioural, and cultural fit among these workers while at once there is a business fit for the building industry. Construction technology will change the face of worker skills in the years ahead of us. Roofing systems today take about a month to complete for every floor. This has been crashed by other technologies outside India to a point where a roof slab can be completed in less than three days. These winds of change will also alter the way construction skills will be utilised by the industry. If you have such statistics as nearly 80 percent of our construction workers are unskilled, don’t you think it would benefit if builders and developers have their own skill-improvement-programmes? Well, 94 per cent of India lacks literacy. Yet our GDP has been growing steadily at over five per cent. Who makes or creates this wealth? Who manages this wealth? You can see that the massive chunk of the ‘illiterate’ actually create the wealth while a small percentage of under three per cent actually manage the wealth. This difference between creating or managing wealth needs humane understanding, of the wealth-creators and the needs of this illiterate mass of people who carry a skill that is equal to that of the wealth-manager — be it a qualified engineer, or supervisor, or project manager or the promoter himself. Society will, of course, benefit if the building industry voluntarily came up with ‘skill improvement sessions’ that are dictated by the market and customer for quality and safety of construction. This is already happening even if in very modest ways, with a few select companies that invest in their people. Most builders, as companies in any sector go, have their own unique work cultures. A builder company, usually owned and driven by a family-led promoter, evolves its network of supply-chain providers. It is therefore necessary that they evolve their own skill development programmes.
More than having to train construction workers, we need to ‘train the trainers’ who are within the company. Most builder-companies will baulk at the prospect of having to train construction workers who are not on their roles and are employed directly by the contractors. This means that there is no certainty of tenure for the construction worker who is trained at the promoter’s cost. The training of trainers who are within the company will make for greater impact in terms of the behavioural fit the company seeks, and such a programme for workers on project sites can be better imparted by those who are employees of the company than by those who are itinerant construction workers on projects of the company. What are the tasks that your programme trains people in? We envisage the training of about 1,000 field engineers across the building industry in the first year of its operations. The barrier continues to be the reluctance of the building industry to see the benefits or of the effectiveness of delivery of such programmes. It will extend to attitude, ability, etiquette, understanding purpose, and then into systems, processes, operating procedures, visual manuals of workdetailing, and such elements that form the entire spectrum of work challenges on the ground. The programmes run for two months and come with a certification that will have some legitimacy for the workers in terms of securing them employment at a slight premium over building industry wage norms. The certification is not merely from the BCIL Alt Tech Foundation, but will have the authenticity of an external, impartial and respected body that validates the programme. The success of the programme will first register more with engineers than construction workers. But over about five years, the BCIL Alt Tech Foundation hopes to have trained 100,000 such engineers across cities in India.