TTK Prestige non-executive chairman TT Jagannathan said, “During the lockdown, migrant labourers who went back, haven’t returned. Though the demand is surging we don’t have enough supply. At the end of September quarter, we carried a pending order of Rs 74 crore. We sold only over Rs 265 crore, a lag from Rs 340 crore of orders received. This gap between supply and demand is mainly due to labour shortage in the small scale industries which produced the components.”

Manufacturers say they did not expect demand to pick up at this pace.

“We expected the demand to come back only by October, but we saw the surge as early as July, 2020,” Jagannathan said.