Narayana Murthy slammed for advising youth to work 70 hours/week; called elitist

With the conversation on toxic productivity and hustle culture making the rounds in social media for the longest time, Narayana Murthy, the CEO of Infosys, a pioneering ITES startup of India comes out proposing that Indian youth must work 70 hours a week. 14 hours a day!

An experienced founder like himself talking about hard work has not sit right with those that lull on social media, he  has received a brutal backlash for his ideas on work. The CEO has said that in order for India to compete with economies that have made tremendous progress in the past 2-3 decades, youngsters need to work 70 hours a week. The conversation took place on the first episode of 3one4 Capital’s podcast ‘The Record’.

He said, “India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. Unless we improve our work productivity, unless we reduce corruption in the government at some level, because we have been reading I don’t know the truth of it, unless we reduce the delays in our bureaucracy in taking this decision, we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress.” Further, he added, “This is my country. I would like to work 70 hours a week.”

The message has gone viral and has drawn criticism for utterly disregarding the concept of work-life balance from many individuals.

How elitist of them! How he proposes such demanding work hours is beyond me. Is he aware of how much time individuals spend traveling? How difficult can life be? A person named “X” wrote, “Don’t they deserve time with family?” “With this statement, Mr. Murthy is essentially pushing women out of the workplace,” another commenter said. Men will never divide up the work of caring for others, raising children, and cleaning the house. A 70-hour work week will force women to drop out of school.

A few responses to this ‘draconian’ and ‘elitist’ unsolicited advice has been as follows:

1. “Indirectly #Infosys founder Narayana Murthy is saying..work 12 hours per day spoil your mental health due to NO proper sleep after spoiling ur health,spend lakhs of rupees in hospitals for ur treatment increase the business of Infosys increase profit,revenue of Infosys”

• “For Indians — and not just India — to progress, capitalists like Narayana Murthy should help create more jobs, make better use of their corporate social responsibility funds & most importantly not exploit youngsters.”

• “Seems like Narayana Murthy thinks employees are his slaves… he is trying back to bring back slavery in modern times.”

• “#Infosys cofounder #NarayanaMurthy says Indianyouth shld work 70hr/ week. Let’s quickly see the calculations. Avrg salary 3 lk pa after deduction 20k/month, 5k/week and if work 70hours then it comes around 72rs/hour it’s even less then a dollar/hour. What abt work life balance?”

The founder of Infosys also used post-World War II Japan and Germany as examples, pointing out that for a set period of years, workers in Germany put in extra hours.

Thus, I’m hoping that our business leaders will be able to tell our children, ‘For the first time, India has acquired certain respect.'” Now is the moment for us to solidify and quicken the development, and in order to do so,

We must work really hard, exercise discipline, and increase our output at work, said Narayana Murthy.

He asserted that “every government is as good as the culture of the people” and that the government cannot act unless we are prepared to make the additional effort.

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