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The right to turn off: Disconnecting from India’s overwork trap
The right to turn off: Disconnecting from India’s overwork trap Premium
Supriya Sule's Private Members' Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, now before the Lok Sabha, asks for something very simple on paper. It says workers should be free to let work calls, emails and messages wait after hours and on holidays without fear of punishment. It proposes the establishment of an Employees Welfare Authority to frame guidelines. Employers must define after-hours expectations.
Penalties apply if organisations penalise workers for disconnecting. The bill utilises the language of mental health, burnout and work-life balance. It follows international examples, such as France and Portugal, where employers face restrictions on after-hours contact.
As a private member's bill, it may not become law soon. It crystallises anxieties about time, technology and work in contemporary India. At the same time, not every job can completely switch off. Doctors, emergency services, police and even journalists during elections or disasters often need to stay reachable because lives and public safety are at stake.
The proposal appears universal and neutral. Every worker should log off after work and attend to their personal life outside the office. Contact outside working hours is already normalised across Indian workplaces. A 2024 Indeed survey reported nearly nine in ten employees contacted by managers or clients beyond official hours. Many workers read these after-hours messages as orders, not invitations. Office hierarchies keep this going and wider social norms still praise long hours and doing what the boss says.
Saying no is quickly taken as a lack of commitment. In practice, the right to refuse a late-night call depends on power far more than on personal will. Seniors can quietly draw that line when they want to but juniors almost never can.
The bill envisions a formal sector employee with an appointment letter, defined working hours, HR policies and a work phone that can be switched off. This marks a minority of India's labour force where informal employment remains the norm. Standard eight-hour workdays are more aspirational than real for most.
For white-collar professionals in IT services, finance or corporate offices, the Bill addresses long evenings chained to laptops and smartphones. They negotiate with global clients across time zones and manage 24/7 teams. A legal right to disconnect could draw a clearer line between office and home. It would make after-hours more than a polite fiction in performance reviews and team chats.
The limitations of the proposals become clear in other sectors. Platform delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers face workdays that stretch indefinitely based on customer demand. Platforms and supervisors control availability through apps and GPS tracking. A delivery worker's daily income depends on grabbing peak-hour orders pinged through software notifications. Fixed office hours mean nothing in this world.
Algorithms set the pace of work entirely. Fundamental disconnection requires concrete measures, such as daily hour limits, controls on manipulative app nudges, penalties for over-assignment and formal recognition of gig work as proper employment rather than self-employment. Without these, the Bill remains irrelevant to the majority.
Gender adds another critical layer of complexity. Women in formal jobs often carry a second unpaid shift at home, which includes cooking, childcare and elder care. Studies on the “second shift” show that even when women are in full-time paid work, they still take on most domestic and care responsibilities.
Smartphones and remote work pull office demands straight into this domestic time. They answer to managers sending “urgent” queries and to family members who expect immediate attention. This double pull leaves very little free time in a normal day.
Rules about employer calls miss the fact that family expectations also demand constant availability. Unpaid housework gets almost no policy recognition or structural support, even though it silently props up the rest of the economy.
Actual disconnection needs more than just a rule on phone calls. It depends on better childcare, tools that cut down routine drudgery at home and a more equal sharing of care work inside households. Digital surveillance makes switching off even harder. Smartphones and work apps log when people reply and where they are, using blue ticks, timestamps and GPS trails to read any delay as a lack of effort.
Gig workers live and die by ratings, acceptance rates and other real-time metrics; a few idle minutes can mean a lower score and fewer jobs the next day. This pushes people into constant self‑monitoring and overwork. Choosing not to respond becomes a small act of resistance against a system that expects round‑the‑clock availability.
An inclusive right to disconnect has to cover every kind of worker, not just people with HR manuals and office laptops. Governments need to fix clear daily and weekly limits on working hours and actually enforce them, and employers should be required to pay overtime when people work beyond those limits.
Workers also need protection from being punished when they refuse after‑hours calls and messages, and unions or worker collectives must have real say over how digital communication and “availability” are written into contracts and workplace rules. Link this to labour law reforms, gig worker social security and workplace health.
The current Bill may stall in Parliament as private members' proposals often do. Still, it marks a genuine change in public discourse. A country that once praised nonstop work as the path to success now openly debates the fundamental right to rest and personal time.
(Author: Rahul Verma. The author is a sociologist and independent researcher. His writing focuses on education, labour and social inequality in India.)
Published - December 19, 2025 07:59 pm IST
Source: TheHindu
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