Two Statements, One Assumption

In October 2023, Infosys co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy told an interviewer that India’s youngsters should say, “This is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week” (Fortune, 2023). Fourteen months later, Larsen & Toubro chairman S. N. Subrahmanyan, addressing employees in an internal video conference that later leaked online, asked: “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? Get to the office and start working” — and proposed a 90-hour week that would include Sundays (Storyboard18, 2025; WION, 2025).

Both men were making the same underlying argument: that India’s path to prosperity runs through more hours, not better-organised ones. Both invoked the same comparator — Murthy citing China’s average working hours and the post-war reconstruction of Japan and Germany; Subrahmanyan claiming directly that “Chinese people work 90 hours a week, while Americans work only 50 hours a week” (Changeincontent, 2025). Both statements triggered national debate, parliamentary correspondence, and a wave of public mockery. Neither man, in making the claim, engaged with the substantial body of empirical research that already exists on the relationship between working hours and output. This article does.

The Murthy Doctrine and Its Numbers Problem

Murthy’s argument has remained consistent since 2023: India must match the work intensity of economies that industrialised rapidly, and youngsters should treat long hours as a matter of national pride rather than personal sacrifice. By December 2024, he was advocating not 70 but 72 hours — explicitly endorsing China’s “996” schedule of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, a practice China itself outlawed in August 2021 (IT Pro, 2025).

The international comparison underpinning this argument does not hold up against the same data Murthy invokes. China’s average annual working hours of 2,169 correspond to a GDP per capita of $14,129; Indian workers already average 2,123 hours annually — nearly as many as China — for a GDP per capita of $6,711 (IT Pro, 2025). India is not working dramatically fewer hours than the comparator economy Murthy holds up as the model. It is working nearly the same number of hours for roughly half the output per person. If hours alone determined prosperity, India’s GDP per capita should already approximate China’s. It does not. Murthy’s own wife, Sudha Murty, offered a more measured formulation in a televised interview alongside him: that the determining factor was not hours but whether “work was always a joy,” and that passion, not duration, was what allowed her to work extensively without it feeling like “grinding away” (Business Today, 2025).

The Subrahmanyan Escalation

Subrahmanyan’s remarks, delivered roughly a year after Murthy’s, escalated the claim and stripped it of any framing around personal passion. His question — “how long can the wives stare at their husbands” — was widely read as both dismissive of employees’ personal lives and structurally sexist, presuming a model in which a wife’s role was simply to wait at home (Changeincontent, 2025).

The backlash was immediate and specific. CPI(ML) Liberation MP Raja Ram Singh wrote formally to India’s Labour Minister, Mansukh Mandaviya, requesting that violations of statutory working-hour limits be penalised, and cited both Subrahmanyan’s and Murthy’s remarks in the same letter — along with public endorsements from Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal and Jindal Steel’s Sajjan Jindal — as evidence of a coordinated normalisation of excessive hours among India’s business elite (WION, 2025). L&T issued a statement defending Subrahmanyan, framing the remarks as motivational rather than literal (Storyboard18, 2025). Whatever the intent, the remarks had, by then, already become the most quoted sentence in India’s contemporary productivity debate — a debate that, unlike the remark itself, was not new.

What a Century of Evidence Actually Shows

The relationship between hours worked and output produced has been studied directly, repeatedly, and with increasing rigour for over a hundred years, beginning with data neither Murthy nor Subrahmanyan appears to have consulted.

Stanford economist John Pencavel’s definitive 2015 study, published in the Economic Journal, analysed detailed output records from British munitions factories during the First World War — a context chosen because production needs were effectively unlimited and output per worker was measured with unusual precision. Pencavel found the relationship between hours and output to be “highly nonlinear”: productivity per hour declined sharply once a worker exceeded roughly 49 to 50 hours a week, and fell so far past 55 hours that someone working 70 hours produced no more, in total, than someone working 55 (Pencavel, 2015; CNBC, 2019). The implication for the Murthy-Subrahmanyan framework is direct: every hour beyond roughly 55 a week is not merely unpleasant. By the data’s own measure, it is unproductive.

A century later, the World Health Organisation and the International Labour Organisation conducted the first global mortality analysis of long working hours, examining data from 194 countries. They found that working 55 or more hours a week was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with the standard 35–40-hour week. In 2016 alone, the analysis attributed 745,000 deaths globally to exposure to long working hours — a burden disproportionately concentrated in the Western Pacific and South-East Asia, the regions in which India sits (WHO, 2021; ILO, 2021).

Two natural experiments completed the picture from the opposite direction — by testing what happens when hours are reduced rather than extended. Between 2015 and 2019, the Icelandic government and Reykjavik City Council ran trials involving 2,500 workers — about 1.3% of Iceland’s working population — cutting the workweek from 40 hours to 35–36 hours with no reduction in pay. Researchers from Autonomy and Iceland’s Association for Sustainable Democracy concluded the trial was “by all measures an overwhelming success”: productivity and service provision were maintained or improved across the majority of workplaces tested, and by 2021, 86% of Iceland’s entire workforce had moved to shorter hours or gained the contractual right to negotiate them (Euronews, 2021; CNBC, 2021). In August 2019, Microsoft Japan closed its offices every Friday for a month, giving 2,300 employees a three-day weekend on full pay, and capped meetings at 30 minutes. Measured by sales per employee, productivity rose 39.9% compared with the same month the previous year; 92.1% of employees said they preferred the new schedule (NPR, 2019; CNN, 2019).

India’s Quiet Institutional Pivot

While Murthy and Subrahmanyan were making the public case for longer hours, India’s own legal architecture was moving, deliberately, in the opposite direction — a fact almost absent from coverage of their remarks.

On 21 November 2025, the Government of India brought into force four consolidated Labour Codes, replacing 29 older central laws. The codes permit employers to offer a four-day work week structured around 12-hour shifts — but only with the employee’s consent, and only within an unchanged statutory ceiling of 48 hours per week, with overtime beyond that mandatorily paid at double the normal rate (Employsome, 2026). The reform’s logic was not Subrahmanyan’s: it offered workers the option of compressing the same total hours into fewer days, not the option of working more days for more hours. Separately, the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, introduced at the national level, proposes a statutory right for employees to be free from work contact outside agreed hours, establishing a central Employees’ Welfare Authority and mandating overtime compensation for any after-hours response — a framework already in force in France since 2016 and since adopted by Spain, Italy, and Belgium (L&E Global, 2026).

The contrast is instructive. India’s most visible business leaders spent two years publicly arguing for more hours. India’s legislature, in the same window, was drafting law that capped hours and protected the right to switch off. Neither development resolved the debate. Both confirm that it remains entirely unresolved at the level that matters most: policy.

The Asymmetry of Evidence

Murthy and Subrahmanyan are not wrong that India’s economic ambitions require enormous effort. They are wrong, on the specific and falsifiable claim that more hours produce more output, in a way that a century of economic research, a global mortality study, and two corporate experiments at companies with every incentive to find the opposite result have all independently confirmed.

Stanford’s wartime data found the productivity ceiling near 55 hours in 1915. The WHO and ILO found the same threshold killing hundreds of thousands of people a century later, in 2016. Iceland found that cutting hours by roughly five a week, nationally, sustained every measure of public service quality it tracked. Microsoft Japan found a 40% productivity gain from doing the same thing at one company. India’s own 2025 Labour Codes, written by civil servants with no obvious stake in the rhetorical battle between two industrialists, quietly capped the work week at 48 hours and built in double-pay penalties for exceeding it.

What is missing from the Murthy-Subrahmanyan position is not sincerity — both men plainly believe what they are arguing, and both built genuinely formidable companies. What is missing is evidence of the kind that exists, in abundance, on the other side of the argument. The real story of India’s work-hours debate is not a contest between hustle and leisure. It is a contest between assertion and data — and as of 2026, only one side has bothered to measure.

References

1. Business Today. (2025, January 14). ‘You have to be productive’: Infosys’ Narayana Murthy clarifies 70 hours comment. https://www.businesstoday.in
2. Changeincontent. (2025, January 11). ‘How long can you stare at your wife?’: L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan sparks outrage with 90-hour workweek remark. https://www.changeincontent.com
3. CNBC. (2019, March 20). Stanford study: Long hours don’t make you more productive. https://www.cnbc.com
4. CNBC. (2021, July 6). Iceland’s shorter working week trial hailed as an overwhelming success. https://www.cnbc.com
5. CNN. (2019, November 4). Microsoft tried a 4-day workweek in Japan. Productivity jumped 40%. https://www.cnn.com
6. Employsome. (2026, April 2). India’s New Labour Codes 2026: What changed and what to do. https://employsome.com
7. Euronews. (2021, July 6). Iceland’s four-day week trial an ‘overwhelming success’. https://www.euronews.com
8. Fortune. (2023, October 30). Infosys founder Narayana Murthy wants young workers to have a 70-hour work week. https://fortune.com
9. International Labour Organisation (ILO). (2021, May 17). Long working hours can increase deaths from heart disease and stroke, say ILO and WHO. https://www.ilo.org
10. IT Pro. (2025, November 25). Infosys co-founder called for a 70-hour work week last year — now he says that’s not enough. https://www.itpro.com
11. L&E Global. (2026, January 12). India: 2026, Looking Ahead. https://leglobal.law
12. NPR. (2019, November 4). 4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers’ Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says. https://www.npr.org
13. Pencavel, J. (2015). The productivity of working hours. The Economic Journal, 125(589), 2052–2076.
14. Storyboard18. (2025, January 10). L&T defends chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan amid backlash over 90-hour workweek remarks. https://www.storyboard18.com
15. WION. (2025, January 10). ‘Stare at someone else’s wife...’: L&T chairman’s work ‘90 hours a week’ remark sparks meme fest online. https://www.wionews.com
16. World Health Organisation (WHO). (2021, May 17). Long working hours increasing deaths from heart disease and stroke. https://www.who.int

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