India Will Be Short 5 Million Skilled Construction Workers Within Five Years, Warns Niranjan Hiranandani
He shared the projection in a wide-ranging interview on Before I Became Me, the origin-story podcast series by I.I.M.U.N. (India's International Movement to Unite Nations), hosted by Rishabh Shah.
"On one side, we have unemployment or underemployment in the agricultural sector, and on the other side, we don't have skilled workers," Hiranandani said, citing a current shortfall of 2 million construction workers—a gap that is expected to widen sharply as demand for carpenters, fitters, plumbers, and electricians continues to outpace supply.
He linked the shortage directly to India's education system, which, he said, has been teaching the "same syllabus for 50 years" and must now compress decades of reform into just a few years by pairing college education with mandatory industry internships and integrating AI into the way the country teaches and learns.
The interview also traced Hiranandani's own beginnings, including a story about his father, the renowned surgeon Dr. L.H. Hiranandani, who, at the age of 80, travelled to Germany to learn a new surgical procedure from a doctor 15 years his junior. The twist was that the same doctor had trained under Dr. Hiranandani himself 15 years earlier.
"Don't stop learning," Hiranandani recalled his father telling him. "No matter how old, how great, or how successful you are."
Hiranandani also described how his own marriage was arranged in under 24 hours after his father spotted a young woman at a community event and proposed the match to her family the very next morning. Hiranandani met his future wife for the first time only after the marriage had already been arranged.
Reflecting on India's wealth-obsessed culture, Hiranandani recalled his grandfather's advice to treat money "as a guest, not as God"—something to welcome and value, but never to regard as the measure of a person's worth.
On the ongoing hustle-culture debate surrounding long working hours, he was equally direct, "Smart work has its own limitations. We have yet to see people who are just smart and don't work hard succeed over a long period of time."
He added that founders who chase quick exits are not wrong to do so, but distinguished that path from building a multi-generational legacy, which, he said, still requires decades of hard work layered on top of intelligence.
Published on:
23 July 2026
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