Is India Aiming to be the Land with the Most Toxic Work Culture in the World?

 

Is India Aiming to be the Land with the Most Toxic Work Culture in the World?

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

A few days ago, I read a news report about Narayana Murthy, founder (or co-founder) of Infosys Ltd., calling (directly or indirectly) for a 70-hour weekly working schedule for workers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VyWRDIrixo 

From stating “I have done it for 40 years” to attributing the willingness to work for 70 hours per week to an assertion of patriotism and love for the country, Narayana Murthy did his best to justify this kind of expectation from workers.

 

Shortly after that, another CEO called for an 84-hour weekly working schedule for workers:

https://www.ndtv.com/video/not-70-hours-indian-origin-ceo-calls-for-84-hour-work-week-869221

 

This was followed by an article on reddit.com, reportedly by an employee of the “quick commerce” company (or should I call it a “start-up”) Zepto on the toxic work-culture in that company:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StartUpIndia/comments/1h5h79n/toxic_work_culture_ft_zepto/

 

One wonders, how do these top elite Indians all of them undoubtedly multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires and more, can speak from their cushy ivory towers, advocating a modern-day slavery where large sections of humanity are expected to spend all their living hours for the service of their astronomically wealthy masters. I wonder how many of these pompous advocates of national progress and slave-“patriotism” would have liked it if they were living in huts and slums and mofussil villages and had to see their children (or their parents or close siblings or spouses) being made to work to these slave-conditions. Even if the person advocating this kind of satanic and hellish “work-culture” happens to be himself working in that manner and to that extent, it does not excuse advocating it for others, and most certainly does not excuse calling for it to be imposed on others: a musician or dancer who practices his art for 14 hours every day and has no other likes or hobbies, or a person who has given up all pleasures and possessions and become a sanyasi or muni living a life of complete worldly denial, likewise, does what he/she does because he/she likes it and wants to do it: in those circumstances smug claims like “I have done it for 40 years” show a cold-blooded and self-centred ruthlessness and lack of humanity which, in the attitude of the powerful, is dangerous for India.

 

Today Mumbai has become probably the most polluted place in India: half the area of the city (of almost every part of the city) seems to be in a state of semi-construction (with “redevelopment” of old buildings, construction of all kinds of public utilities and infrastructure projects, and permanent digging up and re-digging up of roads is the most characteristic feature of Mumbai today), and Mumbaikars in the last few years (and increasingly so with each passing day) inhale more dust and cement-powder than air, and more than they must ever have done in the whole of the previous hundred years combined. In the process, I see the conditions of the thousands (lakhs?) of workers who take part in all these activities: they (the actual physical or manual workers) are paid 12000-18000 rupees per month, have to work for 12 hours every single day of the week with no weekly offs, and absence from work (or even late coming for unavoidable reasons, since most of them stay in the other end of the city from their workplace) results in hefty cuts in the pay. I am sure the CEOs are not talking about these workers, who are already demonstrating their great patriotism and love for India on a daily basis. But then, instead of raising the living standards of these workers, the ideal “patriotic” response seems to be to somehow try to reduce all workers to the same level as these workers.

 

Then one wonders: why do people work or seek jobs: why do they not try to engage in self-employment (taking of course the success stories of these great CEOs as their ideals)?

This brings us to another great achievement of “liberalization” post-1993 in India: “the end of the permit-licence raj”, as some people fondly describe it. Yes, it is true, the erstwhile permit-licence raj has indeed loosened up to a phenomenal extent: certainly for extremely enterprising individuals who can manage to rise from the dust and pose as models for “rags to riches” stories. But not for the ordinary, illiterate, semi-literate, English-illiterate, and other categories among the teeming millions (especially those who are not agile and savvy enough to be able to take advantage of the countless goodies and freebies distributed by vote-hungry politicians, or are not in a position to take advantage of “reservations” of any kind). But go onto the streets of any city, town or village in any part of India and look around and see the condition of the ordinary poor people for whom the permit-licence raj has not only not ended, but has become much more terrible and toxic. Self-employment is impossible: see the condition of hawkers, (probably one of the oldest professions in the world) who are not only burdened with endless permit-licence raj rules and regulations and red-tapism, but permanently and continuously at the mercy of extortionist criminals as well as local government employees (civic staff, policemen, etc.). Every day, in the streets of Mumbai (and countless other places), we see scenes reminiscent of the old Hindi movie scenarios where the inhabitants of a village run for cover when a dacoit-gang invades the village: only here, it is hawkers running for cover when a gang of civic staff set out on their extortion and goods-confiscation rounds.

I had written about this as long ago as in my article in the Sita Ram Goel Commemoration Volume published by Voice of India in 2005:

I had quoted an article by Tavleen Singh (admittedly not one of my favorite journalists) from 2004 as follows: “There are other reasons to fight for our right to property, and they concern the poorest of the poor. Because Indians do not have the right to own property, policemen and municipal officials routinely confiscate and destroy property belonging to pavement hawkers, rickshawallahs and streetchildren. These are people who constitute what our politicians like to call the ‘weakest sections’ of the society, so let us have no qualms in acknowledging that the Prime Minister’s move to introduce reservations for ‘weaker sections’ in private companies is for political and not compassionate reasons. Had any Prime Minister one ounce of compassion for the ‘weaker sections’, he would have arrested officials and policemen who steal from pavement hawkers and rickshawallahs”.

Further on, (it was a long article, and I only quote the bit on hawkers) I added my own views: “If all this had been accompanied by genuine freedom to work, earn and live according to their talents and capacities, that would have been some compensation, at least to the more enterprising sections among them; but as pointed out earlier, there is genuine freedom only for foreigners, and for the elite sections of society: for the rest, the official step-motherly treatment of street hawkers (perhaps the oldest and most traditional examples of self-employed people in India) and cottage industries (in urban slum areas and in villages all over the country) today illustrates how “liberal” the Indian economy is becoming for the common people”.

I gave my own idea of a truly liberal Hindutva socio-economic policy: “Can a state which promotes perpetual terrorism against its citizens protect those citizens from other terrorists? Not from the “Islamic” or “Pak-sponsored” terrorists, so dear to the discourse of our politicians, but from the terrorists who more directly affect the common man and make his life perpetually miserable: lower caste people in remote villages from the dominant castes in their areas (read, for example, Nalini Singh’s “Aankhon Dekhi ¾ Booth-capturing viewed from a BSP field office” in the Times of India, 18/4/2004); any linguistic, religious, caste, or other minority in any area from the majority in that area; women from predator men; children from predator adults; aged people from ruthless youth; physically or mentally handicapped people from other, “normal”, people; inmates of prisons, orphanages, old age homes, mental asylums and boarding schools, workers in factories and offices, or even residents of ordinary homes, localities or villages, from their various tormentors; and the common man from injustice and insecurity, crime and oppression, hunger and want, diseases and natural disasters, ignorance and illiteracy, superstitions and oppressive traditions?

Providing protection, security and aid, to one and all, from all these things, is not a part of any “liberalisation” or “reform” agenda or program. But, it should be a very important and basic part of any Hindu Nationalist socio-economic agenda”

So. it is time to stop forcing people to become first workers and then slaves; and to start encouraging people to be self-employed and removing the terror-atmosphere that is faced by common people who genuinely try to be self-employed. For those who are employed, it is necessary to see to it that they remain employees and do not become either pampered leeches sucking the blood of the economy (as, to be frank, large sections of government employees actually are today)  or bonded slaves.