As the debate around 70-hour work week versus work-life balance rages on, Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has waded in with his views on the matter.
"There is so much precedent for 4 day work weeks, in socialist- leaning Nordic or Scandinavian countries to show that this form of ecosystem does not work as well as capitalism," Kamath said while speaking at CNBC TV18's India Business Leaders Awards 2023 earlier this week.
"If we are all agreed to the fact that capitalism is the way to go, the very thing that we need to cherish is competitiveness. Everybody needs to be able to compete with everybody. If you want to compete by the number of hours of work, you should be able to do it," he added.
Interestingly, his elder brother Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath had tweeted in 2021 that the company was ‘killing’ all work-related chats post 6 pm and holidays.
At the awards, Nikhil Kamath also spoke about how the interest rate regime could hamstring India’s growth prospects.
“Interest rates might have gone up in the US by 1,000-1,500 percent, but they have also gone up in India. Even if we have not seen the effect of that on consumption truly yet, if interest rates stay here, starting from real estate and across sectors we will see a higher cost of capital leading to some kind of a slowdown in consumption,” he said.
“I think that's bound to happen if it's not already happening. But as long as we continue to do relatively well compared to the rest of the world, I think we will be fine,” he added.
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das recently said that India’s Q2 GDP growth numbers are expected to surprise on the upside. Recent indicators of growth and their momentum suggest that the latest quarter’s growth could potentially beat RBI’s expectations of 6.5 percent.
Meanwhile, Kamath also praised the government for being able to sell the India story very well globally. He, however, feels that the country needs to invest a lot more in research to enable domestic intellectual property (IP) creation.
“When you are looking to invest from an India perspective, I think we need to spend significantly more on research. We need to allocate a larger budget towards research because so much of the IP creation is still happening outside India. I would say that across sectors I am investing in, India has to move away from that place where we are doing what the west did, replicating it in an India specific manner. We need to really focus on IP creation in India,” he said.
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