New Working Time: Government’s new proposal regarding working time, know how much time you will have to work now
12 Hours Working: There has been a debate on working hours for the last few months after Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy suggested a 70-hour work week. L&T chairman and managing director S.N. Subrahmanyan also sparked a debate on social media by suggesting a 90-hour work week
12 Hours Working: The Karnataka government is proposing to amend its Shops and Commercial Establishments Act, 1961 to increase the daily working hours in the state from nine to 10 hours and allow up to 12 hours of work in a day. The Karnataka State IT Employees Union (KITU) on Wednesday opposed the proposal and called upon all to oppose it.
What’s in the new proposal?
According to a report in ‘The Hindu’, if the proposal is approved, the quarterly overtime limit will also be increased from 50 to 144 hours. The development comes after the Andhra Pradesh government made a similar proposal earlier this month, proposing to increase the working hours per day from nine to 10 hours. That proposal too faced massive opposition in Andhra.
Karnataka’s labour department has said in the draft amendments to various stakeholders that this has been done to change the state’s rules as per the instructions of the central government. They say that the central government had asked all the states to consider increasing the limit of working hours. According to Deccan Herald, the department also said that states like Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have also taken similar decisions.
Karnataka IT/ITES opposed the proposal
The country’s largest IT hub Bangalore is in Karnataka itself. This is the reason why the Karnataka State IT Employees Union strongly opposed this proposal on Wednesday. KITU said in a statement, ‘The proposed amendment to the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act seeks to normalize the 12-hour workday. The existing Act allows a maximum of 10 hours of work per day including overtime.’
The union said the amendment will allow companies to adopt a two-shift system instead of the three-shift system currently in place, and one-third of the workforce will be out of jobs. “A proposal to amend the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act to facilitate a 12-hour workday has been submitted in a meeting convened by the labour department with various stakeholders from the industry on June 18,” KITU said.
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Debate continues on long working hours
It is worth noting that the Pre-Budget Economic Survey 2025 had cited studies to say that working more than 60 hours per week can have an adverse effect on health. The survey said that sitting at a desk for long hours is detrimental to mental health, and individuals who spend 12 or more hours (per day) at a desk are more likely to have a disturbed or conflicting level of mental health.
However, Subramanian received criticism from some peers in the business community. RPG Group chairman Harsh Goenka said that working long hours is a recipe for burnout, not success. Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra also stressed that the focus should be on the quality and productivity of work, not the time taken to do the work.
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