Infosys’s Narayana Murthy wants a 70-hour work week, while L&T chairman N. Subramanyan went one up by calling for 90 hours, adding for good measure his by-now notorious claim to immortality: " How long can you sit staring at your wife?”
Perhaps they both need to hold their horses. The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC) just released a working paper on how much time Indians spend working, and it is illuminative, quite.
First of all, yes, it’s true. Indians, on average, do work a lot. Indians work an average of 42 hours per week.
This may sound much lower than the 70 and 90-hour weeks that are in public conversation currently, but there is more to it than meets the eye. It is the variations, between India and other countries, as well as between various states within India, that are the true eye-opener.
Between countries, India is at the wrong end of the graph, with longer working hours than almost all countries that are still richer and more advanced than her. The US, France, Germany, Japan, Norway etc... all have way lesser average working hours compared to India. The OECD countries, essentially the richer countries of the West, have an average of 33 hours per week, compared to India’s 42 hours per week.
The only exception, if it can be called that, is Singapore, where people work much longer than India, even while it remains almost ten times better off GDP per capita-wise.
Interestingly, many of the fast-growing economies of Asia are in the same boat as India, working pretty long hours. This includes countries like China, Malaysia, the Philippines etc. For the record, Pakistanis work much less than Indians, so there!
The data gets more fascinating as we turn our gaze inward, and the distinct variation between various parts of India. The national average of 42 hours shoots up to nearly 67 hours of work per week for the union territory of Daman & Diu, apparently the hardest workers in the country. Fellow union territories Dadra & Nagar Haveli are close behind at more than 60 hours of average work per week, then followed by the national capital, with Delhiites working an average of 50 hours every week.
Many of the better-performing state economies hover around the national average, like Gujarat (44 hours 30 minutes), Tamil Nadu and Telangana both just above 43 hours, while Maharashtra, India’s richest state, along with Kerala and Karnataka, both fairly well off, come in at above 41 hours of work every week.
Want the best argument for working less? The state with the least average man-hours spent every week, at just 33 hours, is the state with one of the highest per capita incomes in the country, Goa!
And yes, no surprise when EAC member and author of the paper, economist Shamika Ravi says that “government employees work fewer hours than average Indians and significantly less than employees of private/public limited companies.”
The study used survey data from the government’s own Statistics department to arrive at the conclusions. “It is…true that major economic gains can be made by increasing the time on employment-related activities. This is particularly relevant for states (example the Northeastern states) and sectors (example the government sector) where people work significantly shorter hours per day compared to the rest of the country,” Ravi notes in her paper.
