Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy recently suggested that young Indians should volunteer to work 70 hours a week. His observation during a podcast was that India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. India must improve its work productivity, and the youth must shoulder the responsibility for the nation’s progress. “So, therefore, I request that our youngsters must say, ‘This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week.” There has been a deluge of angry criticism of this suggestion. However, as we shall see, the idea is not outlandish. It has only to be viewed in proper context.
Prejudiced Criticism
Such is the prejudice that critics pounced upon Murthy with all sorts of unrelated statistics of working hours in various sectors and places without realizing that he spoke of a ‘desideratum’ and not a ‘factum’. He expressed a sentiment, not a diktat for the entire corporate sector.
Critics instantly started blabbering about work-life balance and the impact of long working hours on employees’ health and well-being. As expected, it was assailed as a thinly veiled endorsement of more inhuman exploitation of the Indian working class. Somebody called it slavery also. Others said that in the era of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT enhances productivity. Still, others spoke of whatever they understood by their notion of ‘smart work’.
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Some pontificated that India could become rich only after its workforce was equipped with enough capital. Some ventured into the realm of generalized theory and said that India needed to increase productivity through the use of technology rather than taxing labour. While it is true that creative ideas may come to intelligent people in a flash, whereas they may elude mediocre people even if they toil for days altogether, an investment banker-turned-novelist claiming that one could work 35 hours a week and still achieve a lot was plainly stupid—very few industries and sectors depend critically on creative ideas.
Let Us Not Invoke Patriotism Unnecessarily
To narrowly interpret that only longer working hours make for nation-building is preposterous because nation-building depends on myriad things, not all of which are directly linked to hours devoted to routine work in most industries, done in a mechanical fashion.
This is not the Soviet Union fighting for its life in the Second World War when Soviet industrial workers had toiled unimaginably hard and with the sheer sweat of their eyebrows, produced a staggering over one lakh tanks, over two lakh aircraft, over three crore rifles, nearly ten lakh artillery guns, fifteen lakh machine guns and nearly three lakh military vehicles in less than six years for the national war effort, which enabled the Soviet Union to emerge victorious! Incidentally, Murthy had made a reference to the Germans and the Japanese after WWII, “They made sure that every German worked extra hours for a certain number of years.”
Even as some critics realized the truth in this, such is the bias that they started speaking in terms of clichés like ‘shared destiny’ and ‘inculcating a sense of ownership and commitment to one’s country’. They had the gall to say that we need corporate India to have a sharper sense of its responsibility towards our country beyond tax monies and CSR projects as if the youth do not have any mind of their own.
Hard Work Matters
Murthy’s notion of how post-war Germany and Japan grew rich may be challenged because several factors were responsible, such as the Marshall Plan that had provided $13.3 billion (equivalent to $173 billion in 2023) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies. However, that does not change the fact that difficult times demand ‘extra hard work’ by the people. An actor correctly analysed that Murthy really meant transcending your comfort zone and pushing your boundaries. A corporate honcho also opposed the five-day week and observed, “It’s not about burnout; it’s about dedication.” But, the biased critics refuse to understand.
We are talking of inspired people and not ‘driven’ people. Hard work never fails to deliver as long as people do not shirk. Forced longer working hours on uninspired people do not make them more efficient or more productive.
Companies Have Reasons for Longer Working Hours
It is only for places where people are operating sensitive or dangerous machinery in an industrial plant or elsewhere, their remaining alert is paramount. Having tired people there may not only be counter-productive but dangerous too.
However, for those working in sectors where the primary tasks include working on computers in offices, attending meetings or video conferences, client meetings, or making presentations, etc., productivity may indeed increase by longer working hours because that would enable to company to meet deadlines. Longer working hours facilitate dealing with MNC colleagues or international clients sitting in different time zones. If there are colleagues or clients in say Berlin, it would be embarrassing for the MNC if their employees in Gurugram were to argue that their office hours have ended four-and-a-half hours before the Berliner’s and they cannot wait for them. In fact, stretch hours are the norm in sales within banking, financial services and insurance, fast-moving consumer goods, and pharma sectors.
If longer working hours result in greater profits for the company, they also lead to heftier pay packages. If people are happy with the fat packages and the luxurious lifestyle that ensues from them, how can anybody object to it?
Self-Employed People Anyway Work Extremely Hard
I personally know hundreds of self-employed people earning in a great range of a few thousand to millions of rupees per month in various types of businesses and professions who work much more than 70 hours a week. Such people include doctors in private practice, architects, shopkeepers, lawyers, businessmen, industrialists (from small to medium to big), contractors, builders, fabricators, artisans, etc. A school friend, who is an orthopaedic surgeon, single-handedly runs a 30-bed private hospital with 2-bed OT on the outskirts of Varanasi. He gets up at 4 a.m. and starts the OT by 5 a.m., which continues up to 9:30 a.m., performing an average of 100 surgeries a month. He starts the OPD at 10 a.m., which continues up to 3 p.m. He lives on the upper floors of the hospital and is always available after 3 p.m., for emergency cases of road accidents and falls, etc., which regularly come from nearby villages. This routine continues unchanged seven days a week, coming to about 98 hours a week! On the lower end, most of the cab and auto drivers work up to 18 hours a day, with many of them snatching a little nap in the vehicles themselves. There are actors and struggling actors who even sleep on the sets.
In fact, I hardly ever see all these people completely “free”. Even when having dinner, they attend several calls or make them. Even when they are walking in the park, they are almost constantly talking on the phone, giving instructions about payments, tenders, contracts, deliveries, meetings, etc.
Have they ever complained? No, because they have chosen that life out of their own volition and they are happy with it. Have their families complained? No, they are happy with it. Had they been genuinely unhappy with their working hours, they would have forced the menfolk to do something else. If they are not able to devote enough ‘quality’ time to their wives and kids, everybody concerned has accepted that as fait accompli.
Their priorities are clear. I know thousands of wives who are happy with the money their perpetually working husbands bring home; the jewellery they buy for them to flaunt on Karwa Chauth, Akshaya Tritiya, Diwali, Garba dances, kitty parties, and club gatherings; the lavish dinners in five-star hotels; frequent parties with friends; holidays abroad, and the like. They do not really care if their husbands do not devote much time to them. So is the case with their kids. As long as they get all the money they need to spend on themselves and their friends, dresses, parties, etc., they are happy with it and don’t care if they communicate with their dads over WhatsApp only.
Even Service Class People Work Very Hard
As an IPS officer, I have experienced it myself and have watched it amongst my lakhs of subordinates that unless they happen to be out of town on leave, they are never “free”, mentally or physically. In effect, they are literally on duty 24 hours a day. The concept of an 8-hour workday for lower-ranking cops exists only in theory. And, in theory, also, they are liable to be called out from their homes or barracks because the strength of cops present by the roster at any time may not be adequate to deal with a situation. Has anybody prescribed that there would not be any problems like rioting, murder, rape or accident in an area when the cops for that area are enjoying their off-time? Has anyone ever complained? Nobody had forced us to take that job in the first place and when we took it up, we knew what it entails. We took it in stride because we had made a conscious decision that the label of IPS was more valuable to us than anything else.
Poor gig workers are not even considered “employees” by the platform companies they work for. They do not have defined “work-hour” rules and to survive, they routinely work for more than 12 hours a day.
Youth Work Harder For Better Pay Packages
One retired JNU professor laments that Murthy is pleading for work, work and work with the sole aim of ‘economic prosperity’. At the same time, we need to rescue the power of our imagination or aspiration for a good and meaningful life. And what does he mean by ‘good and meaningful life’? He says that “idleness” is tremendously beautiful; it enables us to know ourselves and gives us the “surplus” time to look at the sunset and invoke Vincent van Gogh, or meditate on the play of a butterfly with a tiny yellow flower. Omigosh! In which world he has been living? By God, this is outrageous, to say the least.
The poor professor knows not that there are millions upon millions of young men and women who would happily give their right eyes to lead a lavish lifestyle replete with living in high-end societies, flashy cars, five-star dinners, home bars full of the costliest liquor, foreign pleasure trips, kids going to costly schools or studying abroad, etc. They do not mind working 70 hours a week or “being confined to a cubicle in the lavish corporate house, working ceaselessly”, and then consuming mindlessly in a supermall on the weekend, as he puts it. He has no idea that this is precisely what the youth aspire for. An idyllic life replete with time to watch sunsets and butterflies fluttering over tiny or big flowers was not on the cards even in our era half a century ago. The current generation, with competition for survival being much tougher, only pooh-poohs such ridiculous fantasies.
Let the Youth Make Their Own Choices
If self-employed people and many in the service class are happy working more than 70 hours a week, those industrial and corporate employees can also do the same if they are prepared for it. Nobody has compelled anybody to work in a company that makes you work 70 hours a week or more. If you like the pay package and luxurious lifestyle that ensues from it, take it; if you believe that spending time with your family, on your passions or thinking about the higher issues of life with your legs up on a table is more important to you, dump it. It is all a matter of the priorities of the people and the choices they make. It’s their life, their job, their choice; who are these self-styled ‘gurus’ to pass value judgments on their choices?
