On 70-hour work weeks and nation-building

What is required to foster a sense of national purpose is a visible attempt by our top 10% to give to our country and move everyone forward

Published in the Indian Express

Infosys founder Narayan Murthy touched off a debate when he advocated longer work hours for India’s youth. He argued that “India's work productivity is one of the lowest in the world [...] so therefore, my request is that our youngsters must say, ‘This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week”. A sense of ownership and commitment to one’s country is a sentiment indeed worth inculcating in our young and old alike. However, two questions precede: have we done enough to facilitate a sense of shared destiny at a national level necessary to to inculcate this ownership; and second, what does it mean for a young person to contribute to nation-building.  

On the first question, we are arguably falling short. The lives and views of the top 10% dominate our popular culture yet the lived reality for a vast number of young people diverges at birth from these aspirational narratives. Segregation based on class and other markers of social capital are rigidly maintained and it is difficult to think of egalitarian spaces where people mingle as relative equals across these divides. It is also not evident that there’s a readily available path to socio-economic mobility.

As per the  “State of Working India 2023” report, over 40% of graduates under 25 years old are unemployed while income among the salaried have remained stagnant. The inability to productively employ educated youth is a top-down failure both because often mass education is subpar and ‘cause there are not enough jobs. There is thus a case to be made to absorb more people in employment so as to give them a foothold in the formal economy and an opportunity to learn instead of artificially reducing open positions by extracting over-time from those who are employed. 

Consider too, the nature of work we are creating for our young people. One of the most visible and accessible avenues for employment for our youth is becoming a gig worker¹ to drive a taxi or deliver packages. Set aside for a minute the important issue of fair compensation to focus only on the learning potential and growth prospects of such work. There is none, unlike other jobs where even if one starts at the lowest level on the assembly line, there is some ability and opportunity to interact with others, acquire new skills, build out a larger perspective and advance. Instead, the defining characteristics of tech platform driven gig economy jobs is their fungibility and repeatability but also atomisation which makes it impossible for anyone performing these roles to gain larger responsibility (within the framework of the platform)  irrespective of performance or capability. 

Yet a small segment of India is booming. Our rich and successful are part of the global elite and are feted around the world. There are other reports which chronicle how the benefits of growth are disproportionately being cornered by the top 10% of the population resulting in K-shaped growth where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Set against this context, an ordinary young person may not feel that s/he is an equal participant and stakeholder in national progress. The onus is thus on those of us with power and platform to first make a tangible effort to create that sense of shared belonging and ensure equitable growth before we exhort our young to work harder in the name of nation-building. 

The second question is what does it mean to contribute to nation-building as a young person. Nation-building is an act of citizenship and “productivity” measured narrowly in economic terms cannot be a constitutive element of citizenship. This logic if allowed to stand will render some citizens more valuable than others in principle, not just in unfortunate practise. Instead we should encourage and facilitate our youth to learn about their own country, develop empathy and build skills required to navigate the diversity and complexity of our country, and engage in their community. These are real acts of citizenship and nation-building. 

Mr Murthy is correct that “youngsters form a significant majority of our population and they are the ones who can build our country”. However, he errs in putting the onus solely on our youth to “shoulder the responsibility for India’s progress” without talking about the role - and indeed responsibility - of those who have power and privilege to give back to their country. It is rhetorical to exhort our youth to contribute to nation building if we don’t empower them with the requisite skills or facilitate them with avenues for productive engagement. The Indian elite has benefited enormously from India’s growth and success but sometimes there is a faint sense of smug satisfaction that their unprecedented success is itself their outsized contribution to India thus earning them the right to advise and admonish those less fortunate. Yes, India needs to improve its productivity and we may need a cultural shift towards discipline but equally we need Corporate India to have a sharper sense of its responsibility towards our country beyond tax monies and CSR projects. Instead, what is required is to foster a sense of national purpose and a visible attempt by our top 10% to give to our country and move everyone forward. 

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1. All jobs are valuable and it is not my intent to de-value any opportunity which has helped many find remunerative work and take care of their families. At the same time, it is incumbent on us to think through ways in which we can supplement such work through additional training and growth opportunities for at least those workers who have spent some minimal threshold of time with the platform and have performed well.