In spite of some trolling on social media, Narayan Murthy has been steadfast in saying that he expects young Indians to work 70-hour weeks, but a respected voice from India’s startup community has now seemingly contradicted his position.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has indicated that not everyone in a country needs to put in 70-hour weeks for the country to succeed. He has also highlighted some long-term downsides of a large section of the population working extremely hard on their careers. Vembu has said that people putting in 70-hour weeks could lead to serious demographic concerns.
“The rationale behind the 70 hour work week is “it is necessary for economic development”,” Vembu posted on X. “If you look at East Asia – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China have all developed through extreme hard work, often imposing punitive levels of work on their own people,” he added.
“These very countries also have such low birth rates now that their governments have to beg people to make babies. Two questions arise: 1) is such hard work necessary for economic development? 2) is such a development even worth the price of a lonely old age for a large mass of people? My response to the first question is that it is enough if only a small percentage of the population drive themselves hard. Please note the “drive themselves” – I am in that camp but I am not willing to prescribe this to anyone else. Some percentage of the population will drive themselves hard (may be 2-5%). I believe that is sufficient for broad based economic development, and the rest of us can have decent work life balance. I believe such a balance is needed,” he added.
“On the second question (of whether development is worth the price of a lonely old age), no it is not worth it. I don’t want India to replicate China’s economic success if the price is China’s steep demographic decline (which has already started). India is already at replacement level fertility (southern states well below that already) and further declines to East Asian levels won’t be good. I do believe we can develop without needing to work ourselves to demographic suicide,” he said.
Vembu didn’t name Narayan Murthy directly, but he countered the argument that Murthy has been making for months now about Indians needing to work extremely hard to help the country become developed. Vembu however says that not everyone needs to work hard to develop a country — around 2.5 percent of the population working extremely hard can get it there. He also said the downsides of working hard manifested in people choosing careers over their families, and not having enough children. This could in turn lead to population collapse, as is being seen in countries like Japan and Korea, and prove more detrimental in the long run. It’s an interesting argument, and one that Narayan Murthy will likely be asked about to if he brings up the 70-hour week issues at future events.