Should we work for 70 hours a week?

Narayan Murty reiterates his view that Indians should work 70 hours a week. First of all, I have immense respect for Murty et al. for bringing the IT revolution to India. It has undoubtedly changed crores of Indian lives for the better. Nevertheless, I understand the backlash against his view.

Smruti Sarangi on LinkedIn makes a very important point. "In Delhi, a good UrbanClap employee (plumber/carpenter/electrician) does indeed work for more than 60-65 hours... Many IIT Professors start their day at 8 AM and are active till 11 PM (easily 12 hours of work time). If you consider a senior person like an IIT Director or a bureaucrat, you will find his/her calendar to be officially booked for about 50-60 hours per week.

Yes: The moral of the story is that many Indians, on their own volition, do indeed put in really long hours."

Let's take a deeper dive. Works can be classified into two broad types.

T1: The number of work hours is proportional to the value it adds. A security guard works at the gate for 6 hours. If the working hours increase to 12, it can be assumed that the value added has doubled

T2: The correlation between the number of work hours and the value it adds is very weak. A scientist spends 6 hours a day in the lab. It would be difficult to predict productivity if 12 hours per day were spent instead.

It makes sense if Narayan Murthy is talking about T1 work. However, the problem with Murthy's view is that it is silent on the compensation aspect. Yesterday, at 9 pm, I met a security guard in our housing society whose duty was supposed to end at 8 pm (8 am to 8 pm). He stayed on because the person in charge was absent. However, the main reason he took up the additional responsibility was that he would be paid for the extra 12 hours.

Extra work hours will not be seen as an issue in the context of the discussion here if, for example, Infosys decides to compensate financially.

There is no point in increasing the work hours if we are talking about T2 work. I never specify the number of work hours for my PhD students. It simply does not make any sense. All I can do is motivate them to work.

People give extra work hours when they see a purpose. For T1, the purpose is mainly financial compensation. For T2 work, the purpose is generally non-financial. Many politicians work extra hours because they genuinely believe the work they are doing cannot be done by anyone else. A few climate activists even risk going to jail because they think the planet will not be worth living without their work.

If Narayan Murthy is talking about our nation's development, his view is not only vague but also misleading. No nation attends greatness by treating its people as manpower suitable only for T1 work. Our IT companies have earned thousands of crores. How many products have they developed? How much have they invested in R&D?

(On LinkedIn, November 2024)