Context:

• Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy triggered a debate recently when he said youths should work 70 hours a week, however, Indians are already the sixth most hardworking out of 163 countries in the world.

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Working Hours:

• According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) data (April 2023), the ranking is based on taking the average number of hours per week for each employed person in India, which works out to 47.7 hours.

• This figure shows that Indians work longer than workers in China (46.1 hours), Vietnam (41.5 hours), Malaysia (43.2 hours), the Philippines (39.2 hours), Japan (36.6 hours), the United States (36.4 hours) and the United Kingdom (35.9 hours).  
• But Indians work less than in smaller countries with small populations such as Bhutan, the Congo, Lesotho, and Gambia.

Productivity:

• The issue, as many industrialists who engaged with Murthy in the debate, is not hours but productivity.
• India is ranked at 131 out of 189 countries based on GDP per hour worked (GDP constant at 2017) for 2021, adjusted for purchasing power parity. 
• Based on this parameter, India is pegged at $8.47 dollars, lower than Vietnam ($10.22), the Philippines ($10.07), Indonesia ($12.96), China ($13.35), Mexico ($20.23) and Malaysia ($25.59) – countries with which India either competes for exports or woos for investment.
• India’s annual growth rate of output per worker was up by only 3.1 percent in 2022, much lower than Vietnam (4.8 percent), China (3.4 percent), Cambodia (3.6 percent) and even Bangladesh (4.1 per cent).   
• For some perspective, while India’s output per worker fell in both 2019 (by 2.9 percent) and 2020 (minus 2 percent) to recover by 3.5 percent in 2021, China saw massive growth in these two years of 6.4 percent and 6 percent, respectively, slowing down to 3.6 percent in 2021.  Vietnam recorded a similar trajectory for the same period.

Wages:

• According to Morgan Stanley Research, manufacturing wages in India are $0.8 per hour. 
• In China, they are eight times higher, in Malaysia almost six times higher and in Vietnam twice as high. Only Indonesia at $1 per hour was the closest to India out of the competing countries.

Source: Business Standard