90-hour work week: Overworking Indians won’t guarantee country’s growth

A remark by Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) Chairman SN Subrahmanyan advocating for a 90-hour work-week has sparked a heated debate around balancing professional and personal lives.

A remark by Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) Chairman S N Subrahmanyan advocating a 90-hour work-week has sparked a heated debate around balancing professional and personal lives.

This begs the question is there an economic case to put in more hours at your work place?

Economists say that though a country’s growth prospects are linked to productivity, productivity itself has more to do with quality of work rather than quantity.

Former member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC) Rathin Roy tells Moneycontrol that the correlation is not between hours of work and GDP growth but between productive hours and GDP growth.

Roy cites the example of the country’s agriculture sector to substantiate his point that if a farmer in India puts in more hours that won’t necessarily lead to greater output.

“A peasant working in a rice field in Bihar and Bengal for 8-10-12 hours a day using primitive techniques has abysmal productivity not because he isn’t working hard but because the tools and resources to increase productivity and ensure better wages are missing,” Roy said.

Lekha S Chakraborty, Professor, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) echoes Roy’s sentiment when she says that increased labour hours have an 'inverse relationship’ with economic growth.

This means higher hours put into work beyond a certain threshold (eight hours) may in fact lead to lower labour productivity and hence economic growth, Chakraborty told Moneycontrol.

India does have laws in place to ensure optimum number of work hours for employees. According to the Factories Act, 1948, no adult worker shall be required or allowed to work for more than 48 hours in any single week.

The ACT also stipulates that after five hours of nonstop work, employees must be given a minimum break of thirty minutes.

The country’s four labour codes, which are yet to be notified, includes the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSHW&C) Code, 2020, that also stipulates that no employee should work more than eight hours in a day or 48 hours in a week.

Roy, however, believes that labour laws won’t fix the issue at hand given that the majority of India’s workforce is in the informal sector.

“The overwhelming majority of our workforce is not subject to labour laws be it agriculture or most of services and manufacturing sectors. Labour laws are not the problem, the problems are a high informal sector, unwillingness to pay more, that 50 percent of our population are sitting in agriculture, that the bulk of manufacturing and services’ activities are in the informal sector, and a formal sector with low productivity that is not able to compete globally and keeps seeking PLIs (production-linked incentive)," he said.

The way ahead?

The L&T Chairman’s recommendation follows a similar suggestion by Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy that urged young Indians to work 70 hours a week.

Such suggestions tend to lead to debates every time perhaps because the majority of Indians are already over-worked.

According to data from International Labour Organization (ILO), more than half of Indians (51 percent) work at least 49 hours a week, which is the second-highest ranking after Bhutan that sits at 61 percent.

The average work hours per week for an Indian employee is 46.7 hours, according to ILO’s data set.

Other developing countries such as Brazil and the Philippines rank much lower with only 11 percent and 19 percent of workers putting in 49 hours or more.

Calls for extended work hours also come at a time when growth in wages has been lacklustre.

India’s wages grew at the slowest pace in five years in the first quarter of FY25, barring the pandemic, with women being worst affected, according to a Moneycontrol analysis in December 2024 of periodic labour force survey data released by the Statistics Ministry.

While the Indian economy grew at 9.7 percent in nominal terms in the first quarter of FY25, wages of regular salaried earners increased 5.3 percent, compared with 7.8 percent in the first quarter of FY24.

Roy says one needs to understand the difference between “kaam” and “gadha mazdoori”.

“In a high productivity and high wages scenario someone putting in more hours could lead to higher growth for a country, otherwise not. We must distinguish between high productivity and higher working hours,” added Roy, former Director at NIPFP.

NIPFP’s Chakraborty said that when many countries in the world are adopting a four-day work-week to enhance productivity, the suggestion to put in 90 hours is alarming, as it could lead to burnout among employees.

“To mitigate this, corporate firms in India who want 90 hours' work-weeks should establish robust social protection measures in the first place, such as those offered by multilateral organizations like the World Bank and IMF (IMF and World Bank do not have 90 hours work week norm, but they have relatively better social security measures), which allow employees to retire with pensions after five years,” Chakraborty added.

Roy suggests that instead of asking employees who are paid less to work longer hours, senior management in the Indian industry should deliver on norms and resources to increase their productivity.

“You could exhort workers to put in more hours while building pyramids around the 2550 B.C., but I am afraid we are in the 21st century,” Roy said.