Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy set the cat among the pigeons with his recent advice to the young to put in a 70 hour work week. Apparently, this is essential if the country is to become a global economic powerhouse. He was silent on whether the rise in the country’s economic status would translate into rising living standards of its citizens. As a long-time sceptic of the theory that GDP growth solves all problems, especially unemployment and low incomes, I wonder, given the way wealth has distributed itself unequally (in India and elsewhere), whether India’s youth would not be justified in taking his advice with a generous pinch of salt.
Narayana Murthy’s assertion begs the question of whether low working hours were the reason for the low rates of growth in the pre-1991 period and whether the subsequent rising growth rates in India reflect greater time spent in the workplace. I am not getting entangled in this controversy but would merely like to highlight some issues, based on my work experience as a cog in India’s mammoth bureaucratic machine.
A 70 hour week (about 12 hours a day in a six day week) does not mean 70 hours continuously at the desk. Whether functionaries of private or public organisations, individuals need to have their nourishment from time to time, their visits to the loo/coffee machine and some time spent in relaxed banter with their fellow workers. It does imply, however, the time spent away from home and from one’s loved ones (Work From Home is a recent COVID/post-COVID phenomenon and the jury is still out on that one). My Personal Assistant in the Secretariat in Mumbai left her home in suburban Vasai before 8 AM and returned home after 8 PM by the Churchgate-Virar local train. My five year stint in Delhi involved, after a ten to eleven hour stint in a stuffy Shastri Bhavan room, road travel of over an hour both ways from Central Delhi to the outskirts of South Delhi (and this when I had the benefit of my own transport).
More to the point is the mistaken presumption that government servants, especially those at the middle and senior levels, have nothing to do with government work once they leave their offices. Having worked in a number of quasi-judicial capacities in the revenue, cooperation and general administration departments, I fully sympathise with the views of the Chief Justice of India, Justice Chandrachud, that a Supreme Court judge probably spends most of her time outside courtroom hours on judicial work, whether it be reading up on cases listed in the coming days, finalising judgments or keeping abreast of the latest developments in jurisprudence. IAS officers with quasi-judicial responsibilities also spend a considerable part of their evenings and weekends dictating judgments. Apart from this task, senior officers of the All India and Central Services have to clear files, to a large extent at home (don’t believe us, ask our long-suffering spouses). This is because the hours in office are often spent in meeting hordes of visitors and in countless, often unproductive meetings. The officer in the field has also to accompany Ministers and those senior to her in the bureaucratic hierarchy on their visits to districts, etc.
The 70 hour week exhortation also does grave injustice to the female half of the population. Whether a homemaker (a term I am not especially fond of) or a working woman, most women put in at least fourteen hours of work a day, seven days a week. National income statistics do not account for labour in the home, covering washing, childcare, cooking, cleaning and a host of other duties. Though men have become a little more responsive (and responsible) in assisting their partners in housework, the bulk of the burden still falls on women — the most evocative image being of women office goers in Mumbai’s locals who chop vegetables, purchased outside stations, on their way home.
Many misspent years in government later, I ruminate over the differences between inputs, outputs and outcomes in the implementation of public policy. You put in manpower and financial resources into a programme, your implementing machinery declares, come April the first (rightly named April Fools’ Day), that so-and-so targets have been achieved, whether it be sterilisations, toilets or drinking water supply to hamlets, and all in government retire to a blissful contemplation of March-end completion figures and rosy visions of glowing annual confidential reports. Till some busy body third party comes along and pricks the sarkari balloon: the outputs are either not there on the ground or the outcomes of the policies do not lead to the achievement of the desired goals, whether it be slowing population growth, reducing child malnutrition or eradicating open defecation.
The input-output-outcome drama applies in equal measure to presence in government offices. The government servant is seen at her desk zealously executing her duties, the files move up and down the bureaucratic ladder, but public satisfaction with the speed of delivery of public services shows no improvement. There is an apocryphal tale of two governments down in South India: “… ( ) government very bad government, apply apply no reply; ( ) government very good government, apply apply immediate reply no vacancy.” It reminds me of the Citizens’ Charters which were in fashion a quarter century ago. Time limits were prescribed for expeditious disposal of cases. For one clearance, my junior officer had suggested a time limit of thirty days. When I doubted that the approval could be given in thirty days, he breezily remarked that on the twenty-ninth day, the department would seek some further clarification from the applicant, thus buying a further thirty days’ time till the last syllable of recorded time (with apologies to Shakespeare and Macbeth).
So, finally, it is not the number of hours one puts in at work that matters, it is the end result of all the work that is put in. Assess your workforce by their contribution to the end-goals of the organisation and its long-term health. Embrace the maverick who can deliver in two hours what others take eight hours to execute and don’t grudge her the attention she gives to seemingly frivolous activities in the remaining hours. Her seeming inactivity may well be the fountainhead of immense creativity that will take the organisation to great heights in days to come.
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