A construction site in Bhubaneswar. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, June 19: The boom in construction activities has pushed up the wage rates of labourers in major towns of the state. Construction activity, particularly in the twin cities, has been badly affected because of the high labour cost.

In the last one year, the daily wages of labourers working on construction sites has jumped by nearly three times compared to the government stipulated wage. Another factor pushing the labour cost has been thinning of labour flow into these cities.

“Government’s price fixation has no meaning at all. The market price is regulated by demand and supply,” said Umesh Patnaik, secretary of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India, CREDAI (Orissa branch).

Apart from mushrooming apartments, a number of big-ticket projects of government of India such as All India Institute of Medical Sciences, IIT, NISER and Regional Centre for Ayurvedic Centre are going on.

Presently, an unskilled labourer charges Rs 250 per day for seven hours of duty. Similarly, a semi-skilled mason charges Rs 350 per day. A skilled mason would charge anything between Rs 360 and Rs 400 for seven hours of work. However, the government has fixed Rs 90 for the unskilled labourers and Rs 125 for the skilled labourers per day.

Patnaik said the labour flow has thinned as migration from the rural belt is declining because of two major factors — one being the availability of rice at Rs 2 a kg and the other is work under the NREGS programme. With rice coming so cheap, the labourers’ meagre earnings in the villages suffice for their needs.

“The scenario has totally changed in the last two years, particularly in the urban areas. The contractors have to depend on the work force of neighbouring states such as Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Almost 90 per cent the work force employed by different builders are from other states,” Patnaik added.

A labour contractor, Pratap Mohany said it was becoming increasingly difficult to find skilled labourers for jobs such as rod binding, chipping and woodcutting.

Samir Nayak, who works for a private company, said: “It’s a tough job to repair a house. The cost of repairing of a house can easily go beyond the planned budget. Even if one employs just one mason and two labourers for the repair work, one would have to shell out nearly Rs 900 per day.”