HYDERABAD: Realtors are worried over the possibility of another spell of lockdown as it would mean the continuation of the nightmare of lack of labourers for the construction activity to go on.
They fear that a majority of the migrant labourers who have returned to their native places may not come back to the city for months together, leading to a halt of half constructed projects. CREDAI general secretary V Rajashekar Reddy, says: “Close to 80% of the pre-COVID projects in the city are sold. Most of the people are paying the remaining amount as discussed before the pandemic.
However, out of lakhs of migrant labourers who have gone back to their native homes, only few hundreds have come back. We are in talks with the state government to make sure that construction activity keeps going if a second lockdown is imposed.
Telangana’s industries too are anxiously awaiting the State government’s decision on a lockdown in the GHMC area, as they contend that another lockdown would be ‘a death knell’ for the sector.
Industries have just started to pick up the pieces after the two-month lockdown, which ended during the beginning of May for the industries sector.
After resumption of operations, the industry still struggled due to scarcity of daily wage workers, as most of them had returned to their native places. Over time, workers began to return to Hyderabad and businesses were slowly returning to normal.
“The labourers are coming back. There is now 50- 60 per cent attendance in industries, and things are slowing getting back on track,” K Sudhir Reddy, president of Telangana Industrialists Federation, told Express.
Federation of Telangana Chamber of Commerce and Industries member Srinivas Garimella requested the State government to look into other options such as enforcing weekend curfews or curtailing work timings for the sector, rather than completely shutting it down.
Earlier, the State government had resumed operations in the industrial sector after taking inputs from Fractal’s AI system that analyses and predicts spread of the infection based on health data.
IT and Industries principal secretary Jayesh Ranjan had stated the same during a webinar.
Hoping that the government may again take the data into account, many industry experts are hopeful that the sector would be exempted from another lockdown.