New Delhi, Feb. 12 -- L&T chairman S. N. Subrahmanyan has a knack for making statements that grab headlines. Not long after suggesting that employees might find relief from the tedium of spending holidays with their spouses by coming to work on Sundays, he has now claimed that welfare payments are keeping labourers in villages and starving the construction sector of manpower.

With L&T employing around 400,000 labourers, Subrahmanyan is not an uninformed bystander. But his argument deserves scrutiny. The government's advance estimates put construction growth at 8.6% this fiscal year-34% faster than overall economic growth of 6.4%. If labour shortages were truly stalling construction, could the sector have outpaced the broader economy?

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