The honourable Supreme Court has decreed that sleeping on the job constitutes valid ground for dismissal. We beg to respectfully disagree. This judgment will unleash a major social upheaval. For one, it puts the jobs of more than 20 million workers in the public sector at risk. Such a drastic change in labour policy should be enacted only by Parliament and not by the Court. The decision will also result in massive social protest. The Left, whose core constituency will be deeply affected by the judgment, should not take this lying down.The judgment is also flawed for other reasons. It is deeply antithetical to Indian traditions. A person who sleeps on the job is the right person for it. Following the Gita’s teaching, he is displaying the right degree of detachment. The fact that a person sleeps on the job should inspire greater confidence in employers. Such an employee clearly has her priorities and values all sorted out. The idea that people should not sleep in odd places and at odd hours is clearly a western import that should be resisted. Ours is the only tradition where even the gods are known to sleep, apparently on the job. The Court has also fatally underestimated the degree to which jobs get done only because some people are sleeping through their duties. Committees, for instance, would be impossible to run without the snoozers. Social and political conflict is bound to rise if people were to pay more attention to what they are doing. And, anyway, how will any nation achieve greatness if has no time to dream?The Court’s decision also does not make the right kind of distinctions. What about the power nap that doctors now recommend for improving efficiency and decreasing healthcare costs? The Court should have consulted social science data on this. There is also the troubling question of what counts as evidence that the accused is in fact asleep. The Court seems to think that someone lying down, with eyes closed and possibly snoring, is actually sleeping. What evidence is there for this? On the contrary, experience shows that people sitting at desks, with eyes wide open, are often sleeping. The Evidence Act will need to be modified to take this phenomenon into account. Otherwise the Court is being patently discriminatory. Therefore, with all due respect we would urge the creation of a constitutional bench to grant sleep immunity from prosecution. Excuse us, while we yawn.
