India is headed to have the world’s largest working-age population but lacks a coherent and conducive work culture to enhance productivity.
Concerned Indian female employee feels tired or stressed due to work. (iStock)
The Rishi Sunak government in the UK recently said no to a proposal for reducing the five-day, 40-hour work week to a four-day, 32-hour one.
Back home, South India’s entrepreneurial icon and the architect of Infosys, NR Narayana Murthy, suggested that India’s youth work 70 hours a week.
Sunak’s government says the reduced hours impair the standard of service their taxpayers expect. Narayana Murthy says working longer hours will make India compete with the world’s top economies.
This is not to ridicule either proposal. This is the difference between a post-modernist culture in the UK and elitist attitudes to work in an aspirational, still-developing India.
Across the world, if you discount the sweatshops in the third world, working hours have stabilised within 35-45 hours a week, give or take an hour or two.
These are not random hours, but timings arrived after decades of human resource experiments to optimise workers’ productivity without compromising their health and motivation.
In India, there are innumerable problems related to work. The quality of work in government departments is unmentionable. Workers became punctual only after digital attendance systems came into being.
Still, there is no control over their lunch and other breaks. Given their financially protective environment with housing, medical and regular Dearness Allowance (DA) revisions, assessment of their productivity is a non-issue.
The 500-odd million workforce in India has various kinds and classes of workers: Daily wagers, casual labourers, and the irregularly employed. There is a distinction in work, time, wage and output for men and women. There is a gigantic force that works 12-14 hours a day.
There are workers employed by the government and protected by labour laws but who work long hours, with or without overtime — for example, the police and government medical staff.
Organised labour is better off in companies. Even though unionism is on the wane, the workers still have their rights protected. But that is not true of millions of migrant workers and the unorganised labour. It is only now that millions of gig workers are fighting to get organised labour status.
To regulate the working and wage arrangements of these millions is a tough ask as it is. Except for the private sector, who precisely links work with productivity? I would like to know. Should a government servant clear a certain quantum of files daily? Or hear a specific number of public grievances in a working day?
We take it to the extremes, like in female sterilisation camps where doctors set tubectomy targets per day and achieve them by hook or crook, irrespective of whether the operations are successful or prove fatal for the women.
Even in the private sector, the picture is not rosy. Better money does not mean fixed working hours.
A 2021 report of the International Labour Organisation — Global Wage Report 2020-21: Wages and Minimum Wages in Covid-19 — revealed that Indians are among the most overworked globally and earn the lowest minimum statutory wage.
It should be admitted that real wages did rise in India, but post-pandemic wage cuts changed everything. The report says Indians already work for up to 48 hours a week, among the highest in the world.
They spend a tenth of their time on leisure and usually bring their work home.
Let us take the 70-hour week Narayana Murthy has proposed. That means 14 hours in a five-day week. If you take out six hours of sleep in a 24-hour day, you have four hours to do everything else after working for 14 hours.
Of course, the 14 hours would not account for commuting to and fro from work. You are expected to enjoy or relax for the rest of your day, which amounts to around two hours.
A sweatshop is a place for rote work, not productivity. Over 35 percent of the Indian population is between 15 and 35 years of age. Estimates show India will have the largest working-age population in the world by 2050.
The need of the hour is not unquestioningly increasing working hours but modernising work culture, a sensitive human resource apparatus and a balance between automation and human effort.
The intervention of the government, the private sector and the entrepreneurial class is hardly discernible.
The 70-hour proposal may sound elitist to most. However, an avoidably moralistic sermon of Narayana Murthy is: “Somehow, our youth have the habit of taking not-so-desirable habits from the West and then not helping the country.”
