Work Hard, Live Poor: The Broken Economics of India’s Hustle Culture

If working longer hours alone could unlock prosperity, India would already be among the world’s richest nations.

The struggling Indian worker (on an average) weaves through a broken infrastructure, survives crumbling public transport, breathes in poisoned air and returns home, exhausted, unfulfilled and untouched by the promises of prosperity.

(Photo: Kamran Akthar/The Quint)

An Indian worker already clocks an average of 46.7 hours per week—a number much higher than the US, the UK, and even China. And yet, India’s labour productivity stands at a meagre $8 per hour, which is dwarfed when compared to the UK’s $56.9 or Germany’s towering $73.05. 

What makes this disparity even starker is that while India’s corporate profits soared by an astonishing 22.3 percent in financial year 2023-24, employment has barely risen by 1.5 percent, according to the Economic Survey 2024-25.

Even more damning is the fact that companies, flush with profits, chose to spend less on their workers, with a State Bank of India (SBI) analysis claiming employee expenses for firms fell from 17 percent of total expenditure to a mere 13 percent.

The Indian worker is already working harder, so the only thing that does not seem to be growing is their income, their dignity, or their quality of life. 

If working longer hours alone could unlock prosperity, then surely, India would already be among the world’s richest nations? But a closer analysis reveals this is not how prosperity takes root in any of the countries worldwide.

In fact, when we look beyond the fever dreams of India’s billionaire class, and turn instead to countries that have genuinely built prosperous, innovative, and resilient societies, we don’t find a culture of endless toil but a commitment to smarter work, to innovate, and a system that values well-being as much as output. 

Global Insights: The World is Working Less and Achieving More 

The average German worker clocks around 34 hours a week. In Norway and the Netherlands, the figures are similar. Yet, these are some of the richest, most innovative, and most resilient economies in the world.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data tells a fascinating story.

Every minute a German worker spends on the job, he produces $1.45 worth of output. In France, it’s $1.39. In the US, $1.50. And India? A sobering $0.13 per minute.

That is not a gap created by laziness so to argue rather this is a gap created by inequality, poor infrastructure, lack of training, and a corporate culture obsessed with sweat over building genuine skills for its workers. 

If anything, the world’s best-performing economies are proving a different truth altogether: Less can be more.

Take Australia, for example. In 2022-23, Australian workers logged a record increase in working hours, and not so surprisingly for economists atleast, labour productivity fell by 3.7 percent.

Working more, turns out, only tired people out faster. It didn’t make them better at their jobs. Even when we examine the quiet revolution happening across Europe, from Belgium to Iceland, where experiments with four-day work weeks are no longer radical ideas, but are increasingly becoming mainstream policy discussions.  

In the UK’s largest-ever trial of the four-day week, 92 percent of participating companies decided to make it permanent. The only logical reason to explain this move is because productivity stayed the same, and at times, even improved while worker happiness increasing at the same time. Even corporate boardrooms are waking up to this truth.

A report from The McKinsey Health Institute estimates that companies investing in employee well-being could unlock $11.7 trillion in global economic value.

The global evidence is overwhelming. Real productivity doesn’t come from chaining people to desks longer. It comes from unlocking their potential, through health, creativity, dignity and balance. 

And that raises the uncomfortable question for India: while the world is moving towards working smarter, why are our billionaires still stuck in the factory-floor dreams of the 1980s? 

Are we merely building a nation of burnt-out, underpaid, overworked souls staggering beneath the weight of impossible expectations?

India's Reality: The Long Workweek Paradox 

In an economy as vast and diverse as India's, the paradox of overworked yet underpaid labour is not merely anecdotal; it is structural. At the heart of this issue lies a complex web of capital intensity, skewed technology adoption, human capital gaps, and regional disparities that together define the contours of India’s economic growth. 

India’s structural composition reveals this contradiction with stark clarity. The services sector dominates GDP contribution, accounting for approximately 54.7 percent in 2023-24, while industry and agriculture contribute 27.6 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively.

However, this composition diverges sharply from employment patterns. Agriculture continues to employ about 42.86 percent of the workforce, while industry and services account for 26.12 percent and 31.02 percent, respectively.

This misalignment reflects a vast segment of India’s labour force trapped in low-productivity sectors, particularly agriculture, which deliver a disproportionately low output relative to its employment share. 

This productivity paradox is further reinforced by the nature of capital deployment. Indian industries, especially in sectors such as automotive and electronics, are increasingly capital-intensive, with technology adoption accelerating, but without corresponding employment gains. Automation, while boosting output, has limited employment elasticity, leaving large portions of the workforce excluded from the formal growth narrative.  

In contrast, states like Tamil Nadu present a more inclusive model. The state’s focus on labour-intensive sectors like textiles and leather, which is further supported by a skilled labour base and business-friendly policies, has demonstrated that competitiveness and humane employment practices are not mutually exclusive. 

However, not all reform stories have followed this trajectory. Rajasthan, for instance, pursued sweeping labour reforms that relaxed hiring and firing norms.

While these policies enhanced factor productivity in isolated sectors, they failed to catalyse widespread employment growth. The outcomes expose the limits of deregulation without strategic investment in job creation.

Meanwhile, West Bengal stands as a cautionary example of the other extreme. Burdened with rigid, outdated labour laws and a historical legacy of unionism, the state has struggled to attract fresh industrial investment. What remains is job security primarily preserved in shrinking, inefficient sectors 

Overlaying this structural inefficiency is a deep-seated human capital deficit. Only five percent of Indian youth receive vocational training, which translates into a vast mismatch between industry needs and available skills. The result is a workforce often ill-equipped for the demands of a modern economy, reducing both productivity and the possibility of upward mobility. 

The condition of India’s working population further deteriorates under the weight of its informal architecture. Around 90 percent of the country’s workforce remains informal, comprising daily wage earners, contract workers, and gig economy participants where many endure 60+ hour workweeks without any social security or institutional safeguards.

Despite the intensity of labour, average daily wages remain low: Rs 182 for casual agricultural workers and Rs 280 in manufacturing. 

This imbalance is even more pronounced when viewed through a gender lens. With female labour force participation at just 37 percent, one of the lowest globally, many women are pushed out of the workforce altogether additionally burdened by an unforgiving combination of domestic responsibility and a workplace culture that celebrates long, inflexible hours.

This is more than a social failure; it is an economic one, resulting in GDP losses that remain hidden from the balance sheets. 

In essence, India’s workers work longer, earn less, and receive little in return. Their labour props up sectors that refuse to modernise inclusively, policies that reform without reinvesting, and a system that continues to demand more without rewarding better. 

The Need to Work Smarter, Not Longer 

The real tragedy of India’s obsession with longer working hours is not just that it is unjust, but that it is economically foolish. Productivity has never been about exhausting people; it has always been about empowering them. 

Evidence from both within India and around the world makes this abundantly clear. Randomised trials in India’s garment sector have shown that soft-skills training alone can increase productivity by over 12 percent. Countries like the UK, Iceland, and Belgium that experimented with four-day work weeks have found that output either stayed the same or improved.  

Yet, in India, where 88.2 percent of the workforce remains trapped in low-skill jobs and less than five percent have received formal vocational training, the conversation is still stuck on how many hours people should work, not how meaningfully or effectively they can work. 

The future lies not in romanticising sacrifice but in building smarter workplaces, through skill development, AI literacy, mental health investment clubbed with flexible labour laws and most crucially, dignity for every worker. 

India doesn’t need a 70-hour or 90-hour work week. It’s pretty obvious. It does need a new 21st-century work ecosystem imagination in an economy powered by human capital with technological adoption, not human exhaustion.

Our youth deserve not just jobs, but lives. And the sooner billionaire CEOs and our policy-makers realise that, the closer the work culture will get to progressive prosperity than exhaunstive burnouts. 

(Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics, Dean, IDEAS, Office of Inter-Disciplinary Studies, and Director of Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), OP Jindal Global University. He is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and a 2024 Fall Academic Visitor to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. Ankur Singh is a Research Assistants with Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES) and members of the InfoSphere team. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)