Russia to bring one million skilled Indian workers amid labour crunch

Russia is set to welcome up to one million skilled Indian workers by year-end to offset a labour shortage in its industrial hubs. The Sverdlovsk region, home to major defence industries, is among the areas expecting the migrant influx

Moscow: Russia will import up to 1 million workforce by the end of this year to address labour shortage in the country’s highly industrialised areas, a business leader said. “As far as I know, by the end of the year, 1 million specialists from India will come to Russia, including the Sverdlovsk region. A new Consulate General is opening in Yekaterinburg, which will deal with these issues,” Andrey Besedin, the head of the Ural Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told the RosBusinessConsulting (RBC) news agency.

Besedin said the migration of Indians would fill the shortage of a highly qualified workforce in the Sverdlovsk region. Sverdlovsk, with the capital Yekaterinburg, is situated in the Ural mountains and is home to Russian heavy industry and military-industrial complex, including world-famous Uralmash and T-90 series tank maker Ural Wagon Zavod.

---

Besedin stressed that industrial enterprises needed to increase production volumes, but the region faced a shortage of skilled workers. Some workers are deployed in the military operation in Ukraine, and young people do not go to factories, Besedin said.

He said Russia was also considering inviting labourers from Sri Lanka and North Korea, but it was a rather complex issue. Migrant workers from India began to arrive at enterprises in Russian regions in 2024.

They were in particular invited by the Kaliningrad fish processing complex “Za Rodinu” against the backdrop of a labour shortage. According to the RBC news agency, the Russian Ministry of Labour predicted a workforce shortage of 3.1 million people by 2030. It proposed an increase in the quota for inviting qualified foreign workers in 2025 by 1.5 times to 0.23 million people.

According to the ministry’s estimate, Russian industrial enterprises attracted 47 thousand qualified migrants from non-CIS countries in 2024. The Ministry of Economic Development also called for expanding the geography of attracting workers from other countries.

However, Russian authorities tightened migration legislation to curb the influx of migrants from the former Soviet republics after the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow on March 22 last year.