Bangalore: A research report by Royal Institutions of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) indicated that there is a requirement of forty four million core professionals comprising of civil engineers, 396,000 architects and 119,000 planners by the year 2020 to deliver potential real estate space and planned infrastructure.

The sector faces manpower crisis in spite of a projected demand of 95 billion sq ft in real estate and construction by 2020, reports The Economic Times.

The supply of professionals in built environment comprised nearly 50 million people in the year 2011 and in that only 2 million are professionally qualified and the remaining are mainly unskilled workers.

The estimated supply of non core professionals in the built environment sector is nearly three times the supply of core professionals. They fall short of the desired skill sets and needed training without sector specific training.

These shortages are likely to lead to recruitment difficulties and it may be because of increased cost of human resources, inability to complete tasks timely, lack of skills in domestic manpower and sub-standard quality of construction.

The RICS report recommended that all stakeholders across government, industry and academia plan remedial measures that help them increase new supply and up-skilling of the existing workforce.

The government is recommended to improve their regulatory framework and enabling policies, strengthening skill development effort and allocation of funds and incentivizing skill development in critical areas.