Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Hospitality sector facing manpower crunch: Study

NEW DELHI: You visit a five-star hotel in the city. There is a fine crop of youngsters serving at the front office, fresh from the institutes. Three months down the line, there is a change. The fresh faces have given away to the old cadre. Your stew tastes different as well because the chief chefs have changed too.
The hospitality sector is facing a manpower shortage. Demand has outstripped supply. And the need for qualified manpower at the supervisory cadre, the assistant manager level and department head levels is increasing.

``Yes! There is a dearth of management-oriented trained people in the industry. We began seeing a brain drain from this sector to banks and multi-national companies 4-5 years ago. And this has increased,'' the GM of a deluxe hotel property here said.
He added that the salary structure in the hotel industry is not inspiring either. A front office assistant who gets Rs 5,000 at an entry level in the hotel industry is offered Rs 7,500 or more in the MNCs sector, he pointed out.

The industry average of people servicing a hotel room is 2:1 in India compared to 0.5:1 overseas. ``But that is because we lack high quality managers here and may need people to attend to the same task,'' the hotelier pointed out.
He said that is one reason hotel companies have begun to see international managers with the required exposure in India. He argued that things have come to such a state as not many people are being trained in the country to service the hotel sector with adequate management courses.

This aspect has now been surveyed and put together in an official document by the working group on tourism--HRD sector for the 10th Five-Year Plan (2002-2007). It was to review the working of trained institutions in the country and also project the requirements of trained manpower and training facilities in the tourism sector during the Plan period.

Manpower is provided to hotels and restaurants in the country from both government-run and privately managed hotel management institutes and food craft institutes.

The group in its report has projected that the shortfall of trained manpower currently facing the sector would burgeon unless training facilities are augmented, beginning now.

It has found that the industry will need to absorb over 26,000 trained personnel between 2000-2001 and 2004-2005. ``The training capacity available at present is only 5700 per year, which leaves a wide gap between demand and supply,'' a group member said.

This has happened as the number of hotel rooms has increased in the country in the last three years, he said. ``Between 1997-98 and now, the number of hotel rooms in the country has gone up from 58,000 to over 78,000 in the approved category and one and half times that number in the unapproved category,'' he said.

The group has suggested that two more institutes be set up with an initial investment of Rs 9 crore as a first step towards tackling this problem.