New Delhi, Feb. 18 -- India's labour abundance, especially for low-paid jobs, has long been taken for granted. It explains why worries being aired over a scarcity make us sit up and take notice.

Recently, S.N. Subrahmanyan, the chief of a company that hires hard-hat workers in hundreds of thousands for construction projects, Larsen & Toubro, spoke of reluctance among such workers to migrate long distances to its site locations. They don't want to move from rural places, he was cited as saying, given the comfort offered back home by welfare schemes.

A problem of labour retention was also identified by Vimal Kejriwal, CEO of KEC International, who reportedly said that workers used to work at a site for almost a year before going on annual...