Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy's remarks about India's work productivity among youth has left internet divided on Thursday. He said that India's youth have to work 12 hours a day for the country to catch up with economies that saw tremendous progress in the last 2-3 decades.
Murthy said India’s work productivity is among the lowest in the world and that in order to compete with countries like China, the country's youngsters must put in extra hours of work as Japan and Germany did after World War II. "India's work productivity is one of the lowest in the world," Murthy said while speaking to former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai on the inaugural episode of 3one4 Capital's podcast 'The Record'.
Murthy implored India's youngsters to take up the mantle of nation-building, proclaiming, "So, my request is that our youngsters must say, 'This is my country. I'd like to work 70 hours a week'."
Murthy further said, "And that transformation has to come to youngsters because youngsters form a significant majority of our population at this point of time, and they are the ones who can build our country."
"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."
Murthy's remarks were equally slammed and praised by the netizens on X platform (formerly Twitter).
"That's not work culture it's slave culture. Indians are sadly known to compromise on family time just to put in extra hours at work," remarked an X user.
"He should start paying a starting salary of $100K also," said another X user.
"Salary should also be on same lines. Coz right now also IT professional are working extra hours regularly but not compensated accordingly," quipped another X user.
"So you're working 70 hours a week across 5 days, which comes out to 14 hours per day. Then, you're spending an additional 2 hours just commuting. That totals 16 hours, and leaves you with 8 hours. Now, how exactly is anyone supposed to believe that this leaves ample time for sleep, meals, and any semblance of a personal life," said another X user.
Meanwhile, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said "it’s not our moment to work less and entertain ourselves".
"Totally agree with Mr Murthy’s views. It’s not our moment to work less and entertain ourselves. Rather it’s our moment to go all in and build in 1 generation what other countries have built over many generations," posted Aggarwal on X.
In its recent post-Q2 results' press conference, Infosys CFO Nilanjan Roy said that Infosys has a significant fresher bench and headroom for increasing utilisation, and hence it “is not going to campuses as yet”.
“Last year, we hired 50,000 freshers and hired ahead of demand…we still have a significant fresher bench… we are, of course, training them on Gen AI etc, but we still have way to go on utilisation, and at the moment are not going to campuses as yet…we will monitor this every quarter looking at our future projections,” he said.
That said, the company will honour all the offers made, onboarding them as projects come up, he said.
India’s second largest IT services firm posted a 3.1 per cent rise in consolidated net profit to Rs 6,215 crore for the September 2023 quarter but trimmed the full-year revenue outlook to 1-2.5 per cent, citing a slowdown in decision-making and sustained pressure on discretionary spends.
Infosys cautioned that discretionary projects and large transformation programmes have reduced significantly amid uncertain macro-environment.