In India, unemployment is a major concern and often a key talking point during elections. However, numbers show that while Indians work some of the longest hours, the country lags on productivity.
Amid this, a case for work-life balance was made during the ongoing Winter Session of Parliament by MPs Supriya Sule and Shashi Tharoor, both of whom introduced separate Private Members’ Bills, the last of which became a law in 1970. Sule’s Bill seeks to limit work hours, secure the right to disconnect, and establish grievance redress mechanisms and mental-health support systems.
How Indians spend their time
The 2024 Time Use Survey (TUS), published earlier this year by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, found that Indians aged 15 to 59 years spent an average of 446 minutes per day on employment and employment-related activities in 2024, up from 440 minutes per day as per the first TUS report published in 2019.
The 2024 survey showed that “self-care and maintenance” activities, which include sleeping and eating, formed the largest chunk of the day for the average Indian in this age category at 688 minutes or just under 11.5 hours. After that, work took up the most time at 446 minutes (7.5 hours), followed by learning (including formal and informal education, and hobbies) at 417 minutes (7 hours).
While women spend fewer hours in employment and far more time on unpaid domestic or caregiving work than men, socialisation and leisure form the smallest share of an average Indian’s day for men and women.
While the 2024 survey did not provide a breakdown by sector, the 2019 survey found that the average government employee spent 45 minutes less at work than the average Indian, and an hour less than the average employee of a private or public limited company.
In a report based on the 2019 TUS published by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, economist Shamika Ravi found that a “1% higher time spent on employment-related activities was associated with 1.7% higher per capita income”. “This implies that if people in a state spend 1% more time on economic activities, then the state’s NSDP (Net State Domestic Product) will rise by 1.7%,” the report said.
However, figures compiled by Our World In Data (OWID), a research publication based at the University of Oxford in the UK, showed that the average Indian worked 2,383 hours a year (or 6.5 hours per day, including weekends and national holidays, or 9.5 hours per day assuming 250 working days per year) in 2023. This puts India at ninth on the global list of the most time spent working, on par with Bangladesh and trailing only a group of African and West Asian nations.
What happens to productivity?
Since the 1970s, Indians on average have consistently worked more than 2,000 hours per year, even as other developed and developing countries saw this figure decline as productivity rose, as per a 2022 International Labour Organisation (ILO) report.
As per an ILO database, Indians worked the highest average hours — at 56.2 hours per week or 11.2 hours per day for a five-day week — among 56 countries for which 2024 figures were available. In 2023, too, India topped the list (56 hours per week) among the 92 countries for which data were available.
Amid the long working hours, often at the cost of leisure and socialisation, not only is India lagging in productivity, but also in terms of the per capita income and other key socioeconomic indicators.
The OWID figures show that in 2023, India ranked 21st from the bottom on productivity, which is measured as the gross domestic product (GDP) per hour of work. The figure for India was $8.1 (in 2021 international dollars adjusted for cost of living across countries). It was marginally ahead of countries such as Bangladesh and Kenya, and well behind first-ranked Norway, where productivity stood at $130.1 per hour, with the average Norwegian worker putting in 1,412 hours in their jobs annually. Germany, meanwhile, with a productivity of $82.5 per hour, saw the average worker spend 1,335 hours annually on their job, the lowest in the world.
What do Indian numbers say?
India’s own productivity figures don’t paint a wildly different picture. As per the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) KLEMS database — which analyses industry-level data focusing on capital, labour, energy, materials and services to measure economic growth, productivity, and efficiency — since 2019, at least nine industries have recorded a decline in labour productivity, including key sectors such as mining. Five other industries, including construction, have only seen marginal growth in the same period among a total of 27 industries analysed.
This declining productivity is despite the share of labour’s income in the industries’ gross output remaining largely unchanged since 2019, barring four industries that reported small increases in labour’s income share.
The 2024-25 Economic Survey found that while corporate profits grew by 22.3% in 2024, employment only grew by 1.5%, and the expenditure on employees fell to 13% from 17% in 2023. This indicates a preference for cost-cutting over workforce expansion, coupled with declining or stagnating wages, all of which are contributing to labour productivity and output lagging, apart from growing inequality.
While Sule’s Private Members’ Bill seeks to address a part of the productivity problem, even if it were to become a law, it would have been unlikely to have an impact on the economy and workforce.
The 2024 Time Use Survey (TUS), published earlier this year by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, found that Indians aged 15 to 59 years spent an average of 446 minutes per day on employment and employment-related activities in 2024, up from 440 minutes per day as per the first TUS report published in 2019.
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