स्तम्भ Stambh · Udyamnīti
Seventy Hours Is a Capacity Confession
When a founder asks his people for seventy hours he is telling you something about his company and nothing about his people.
Nikhil Sharma · उद्यमनीति Udyamnīti · 6 May 2026 · 4 min read
When a founder asks his people for seventy hours he is telling you something about his company and nothing about his people.
In October 2023 Narayana Murthy said on a podcast that young Indians should work seventy hours a week if the country wants to compete with economies that have pulled ahead. The row ran for a year. Half the country said he was right about discipline. The other half said he was wrong about people. Both halves argued about the workers.
Nobody argued about the system. That is the argument I want to have.
I have run companies since 2008 and I have asked for long weeks, usually in a bad month, usually from people who had already given them. I am not writing this from a height. I am writing it because I know what the request means when it comes out of my own mouth. It means I have run out of ways to measure what my people produce and I have fallen back on measuring how long they sit there. Hours are the input you ask for when you cannot count the output.
Hours are the input you ask for when you cannot count the output.
The hours are already there
Start with what India is actually doing. By the International Labour Organization’s figures the average Indian worker puts in 46.7 hours a week. Fifty-one per cent of the workforce is over 49 hours. Only Bhutan is higher. We are not a country that needs to be told to work longer. We are a country that already works among the longest weeks on earth and has little to show for the extra hours, because the hours are not the problem.
Now the figure that should end the debate and has not. The Economic Survey 2024-25, published by the finance ministry, carried a section on mental wellbeing at work built on Sapien Labs data from over 1.5 lakh Indians. Its paragraph 11.75 found that people who spend twelve or more hours a day at a desk report distressed or struggling levels of mental wellbeing, with a score about 100 points lower than those at a desk for two hours or less. Three paragraphs later it found that better workplace culture is associated with two to three fewer days lost per month.
Do the arithmetic a founder would do. You ask for seventy hours. You receive seventy hours for about six weeks. Then you receive a person who is losing two or three days a month to a mind that has stopped working, which is roughly a tenth of the capacity you paid for. Then you receive a resignation, and a hire, and three months of somebody new learning what the old one knew. Call that arithmetic illustrative, because it is. Six weeks at seventy. Then a tenth gone every month to the days lost. Then three months of a vacancy and a new hire at half speed. Average it over twelve months and the number lands nearer fifty than seventy. The exact figure differs in every firm. The direction does not. You asked for seventy and paid a recruitment fee to receive something closer to fifty.
Load is an operating metric
Every company I know measures revenue weekly and cash daily. Almost none measures load at all. Not hours — hours are easy and useless. Load. How many people in the building are past the point where another hour produces anything. Who has not had two consecutive days off in a quarter. Which team has been in a bad month for four months.
These are not soft questions. They are the questions a plant manager asks about a machine and would be fired for not asking. We ask them about generators and not about the people who run them, and then we are surprised when the people fail on a schedule the generator would have warned us about.
The founder who runs load as a metric does not need to ask for seventy hours. He knows which weeks need them and which people can give them and when they must be paid back. The founder who does not run it asks for seventy from everyone, permanently, and calls it culture.
What I would say to Mr Murthy
He built one of the few Indian companies that made the world take an Indian process seriously. He earned the right to an opinion on work. So here is mine, offered with respect.
India does not have a willingness problem. It has a conversion problem. The hours go in and too little comes out, and the fault is in the systems between the two — the unclear brief, the meeting that decides nothing, the approval that waits a week, the commitment nobody follows up. Fix those and forty-five hours beats seventy. Leave them and seventy hours is just forty-five hours of work and twenty-five of waiting, done tired.
A founder who asks for seventy is not confessing ambition. He is confessing that he cannot see where the first forty-five went.
Written in Gurugram on 6 May 2026, four weeks before the long essay this column belongs to, which argues that wellbeing is an operations problem and that load will one day sit in the quarterly review beside revenue. This is the first column in that argument.
Sources: Narayana Murthy on 3one4 Capital’s podcast The Record, as reported by Moneylife, 27 October 2023. ILO working-hours data via Business Standard, 20 September 2024. Economic Survey 2024-25, Chapter 11, paragraphs 11.75 and 11.78.