Mumbai: I wanted to run the 1,500 metres for India,” said Anil Kumar, after completing a test to ascertain his skills at building a scaffolding, a structure used in construction projects to support workers and materials. Once, he was a state-level middle-distance runner but did not have the money for the kind of food a sportsman needs. He did land a college seat under the sports quota but had to give it up after a year because his family needed him to earn money.
“I worked in Dubai and Qatar, but now I want to work in Russia,” said Kumar, 28.
Deendayal Gondh, 36, from Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh, who has studied till Class 10, saw an advertisement for the same job on Facebook and applied. He just wants to make enough money so his child can study, preferably in an English-medium school. Gondh had worked in the Gulf, where monthly salaries were below the $700 figure (around ₹63,000) that many working in Russia were drawing.
The duo were not bothered by the Russia-Ukraine war. Money for home trumped safety concerns, and their experience in the Gulf gave them an edge over the other contenders.
Kumar and Gondh were among about 60 workmen who had assembled at a building in Rabale, an industrial centre in . There was a signboard that said “Russia”, below which, in a smaller font, was the job description: Long Term Oil & Gas Project. The word ‘scaffolders’ was mentioned prominently and below it were the words: ‘free food and accommodation; Gulf experience preferred’.
The name of the company that was recruiting wasn’t given, but that did not deter any of the candidates, many of whom had travelled from Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Some, from Mumbai, had taken a day off or changed their shifts to attend.
A Russian man in a green shirt was interviewing the candidates and then assessing their scaffolding skills in a practical round. The test required them to build a solid scaffolding—an accidental drop of a bolt or any visible nerves meant disqualification.
The recruitment drive is one of many such being conducted to hire workers for Russia. The Eurasian country is the new Gulf for scaffolders, tailors, welders, drillers, cooks and others. They find jobs in the oil and gas industry or construction business, earning at least twice as much as they would in India.
Network of sub-agents
The hiring process is handled by a set of overseas recruiters who, in turn, have a chain of agents and sub-agents who travel around the country, map the skill sets that a region is best known for.
Steel fixers, who secure reinforcing steel bars used to build bridges, are found in Gorakhpur, Kushinagar and Deoria in Uttar Pradesh and Gopalganj and Patna in Bihar. Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh has a good number of mechanical fitters and drillers with experience in the oil and gas sector, while the largest pool is in Gujarat (Jamnagar, Surat and Vadodara), where some of India’s largest refineries are located.
Altaf Khan is an agent who has a team under him mapping demand from overseas recruiters hiring for Dubai, Qatar, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, and parts of Europe. These agents come in handy when direct applications to job posts on recruitment websites are not enough. They get a commission from the recruitment company if their candidate gets shortlisted and, in some cases, may also get paid directly by the job seeker. Unlike recruitment in the white-collar sector, which is more formal and where a job seeker is not expected to pay anything to the recruiter, the boundaries here are more blurred.
Meeting with Mint at the Mumbai office of Shella Consultants, one of the largest overseas recruitment firms in India, Khan explained his modus operandi. “I get the contract from the recruiting company, which in turn gets the mandate from the client. I have a team of agents under me, and they have a larger network of agents under them. Word spreads through WhatsApp groups and social media posts,” he said.
Khan was at Rabale, and like him, there were other agents who had brought their candidates. Khan makes around ₹30,000 per candidate, which he then has to share with the team responsible for sourcing the candidates.
Some, like Yaseer, applied for a job in Russia directly. Yaseer is from Tinsukia in Assam and spotted an advertisement for skilled mechanics who could work on alignment and installation of machinery used in oil and gas fields. He came to Mumbai, took the tests, and after four to six months, got his visa for Russia and flew out.
“When I landed in Moscow, it was minus six degrees, but I got to earn $3 an hour and $4.5 if I worked during the holidays. I have worked in the Arctic and Siberian region, and in St Petersburg. The living quarters have clean barracks, table tennis, and laundry rooms,” Yaseer said over the phone.
He is in India, recovering from an operation, and plans to head back soon. In 2024, when he told his family about Russia, they were curious. “What do you know about Russia? Everyone knows about the Gulf. Why not work there?” But Yaseer had worked in the Gulf, earning $1.5 per hour. Russia simply is more lucrative.
Why Russia?
Russia’s population is ageing and declining. Its total fertility rate stands at approximately 1.37 children per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1 required to stabilize the population, according to data from Rosstat, Russia’s state statistics service.
The country, which has traditionally sourced temporary workers from Central Asia, is now increasingly turning to India, granting work permits to nearly 72,000 Indians in 2024, almost a third of its overall foreign worker count, according to a report from Reuters.
The Ukraine war and the consequent deployment of a large number of Russians to the front has increased demand for labour.
“We have sent a workforce to Russia for the last 15 years, but it used to be 500 to 1,000 workers a year. We clocked 7,000 to 8,000 in 2025,” said Kapil Gupta, chief executive officer of Shella Consultants. “For about two decades, Shella Consultants has recruited for work in the but the trend shows that workers are not very interested in travelling to these regions now. This is because the pay scale has not increased much,” Gupta added.
Before the latest Iran war started, more than nine million Indians lived and worked in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, according to data from the Indian government.
“Russia needs manpower to work in oil and gas, construction and other manufacturing sectors,” said Gupta. He added an interesting detail: “We are also getting calls for manpower needs from Ukraine-based clients, but we have not started working on those mandates yet—we need to be sure the workers will be taken care of,” he told Mint.
While Russia mostly wants workers with skills to carry out simpler jobs of the blue-collar kind, demand for highly skilled workers from India, the white-collar kind, has been rising globally. “The share of advanced economies [Russia isn’t one] in India’s inward remittances has risen, surpassing the share of Gulf economies, reflecting a shift in migration pattern towards skilled Indian diaspora,” India’s central bank said, following a survey that tracked trends and patterns in remittances for 2023-24.
A Mint report last April noted that India is the world’s , with $119.5 billion received in 2023. India also has the largest stock of international migrants in the world, estimated by the United Nations at 18.5 million in 2024, followed by China at 11.7 million.
Currently, India accounts for around 18.6% of the global working-age population (aged 20-65 years), the report added. According to the UN estimates, this is estimated to creep up to around 19% by 2040, by when the share of the working-age population in high-income and upper-middle-income countries is projected to fall by six percentage points.
Risks in Russia
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. According to workers and sub-agents who did not want to be named, the risk lies in working with clients who may have projects close to war zones. “They are not expected to fight, but even working near the front is risky. There are workers who were offered three to four times the pay if they worked at the front by switching clients,” said another agent, who did not want to be named.
“On a couple of occasions, we heard sounds of drone attacks, and the client asked us to stop work and go to designated safe areas,” recounted Yaseer. But those incidents were few.
To protect themselves, overseas recruitment companies make it clear that candidates taking up jobs in Russia do so of their own free will. Videos are taken in which they mention their names, the role they are going for, and a disclaimer that they are going of their own accord.
Siddhartha Mallick, co-founder and managing director of Globeskills International Pvt. Ltd, an overseas recruitment company, told Mint over a call that this kind of recruitment is a tightly controlled process. “Russians do not speak English. They reach out to recruitment firms and sometimes to middlemen who have a smattering of the language (Russian),” said Mallick.
He also has a 12,000 sq ft testing centre in Kolkata, where clients come to assess the aptitude of masons, welders, and carpenters.
Globeskills sends about 500 workers a year to Russia, up from about 200 before the pandemic. If there are any cancellations or the candidate absconds, the recruitment company bears the costs.
However, not all overseas recruiters are willing to take the risk of sending candidates to regions impacted by conflict. “There are many vacancies in European countries, and we send candidates for employment there. Places like Russia and Israel, where there is a higher possibility of risk, are markets we do not want to enter,” said Aditi Banerjee, co-founder and CEO of Magic Billion, speaking from her London office.
A report in January by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies stated that since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties (killed, wounded and missing), more losses than any major power in any war since World War II. At current rates, combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties could reach 2 million by the spring of 2026, it added. CSIS is a nonprofit policy research organisation.
Kumar is unfazed by the risks of working in a war-torn region. A couple of hours after clearing his scaffolding test, he was asked to wait, to discuss salary details. “I plan to drive a hard bargain,” he said. “And if things don’t work out, I will go to Chile.”