Indian industry leaders who romanticise a 72- or 90-hour workweek are asking young people to sustain an outdated, extractive business model in the guise of serving the nation. We already know where this leads. China’s 996 culture — 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week — produced burnout, public anger, and even deaths. China’s Supreme People’s Court eventually declared it illegal, calling it harmful to physical and mental health, and the country now caps work at 44 hours. When the very nation that invented the 996-work schedule has outlawed it, it’s odd for Indian business leaders to promote it as an example for their youth. In fact, China still struggles with extended hours. Early 2025 data show that average workweeks hover around 48.5 hours, revealing how deeply embedded overwork is in its workplace culture. Once normalised, it persists through fear, competition, and job insecurity. For India to embrace a model China itself is trying to abandon is not visionary. It is simply repeating someone else’s failed experiment and wrapping it in patriotism.

There is also an uncomfortable truth about productivity that rarely enters these glamorous speeches about hard work and sacrifice. Many of the world’s most prosperous and productive countries, such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, operate on workweeks of only 32 to 34 hours. They produce more per worker not by squeezing extra hours out of people but by valuing skill, efficiency, and smart systems. Research repeatedly shows that productivity drops sharply once people work more than about 50 hours a week. After a point, each additional hour merely adds fatigue, not output.

India is already close to that threshold. We clock around 46 hours a week on average; yet our labour productivity stands at roughly 8 dollars of GDP per hour, one of the lowest in the G20. That’s not because Indians don’t work hard; it’s because our workplaces are often chaotic, poorly managed, and slow to absorb technology or training. Stretching the week to 72 or 90 hours won’t fix the real problems. It will only let managers tolerate inefficiency while shifting the burden onto tired workers.

China’s own trajectory should give us pause. In the early years, 996 was sold as a heroic national sacrifice, fuelled by a shared dream of progress. However, the model soon reached its limit. Young workers suffered burnout. Mental health problems grew. Talented employees quietly left for more humane jobs. The government stepped in not because it suddenly became worker-friendly but because the overwork culture had become an economic liability. When Indian magnates praise only the first phase of China’s hustle culture while ignoring the collapse that followed, they demonstrate a shallow understanding of what sustainable development truly entails.

This is why India’s new labour codes matter. They are far from perfect, but they do reflect an attempt to make work more humane and predictable. The codes preserve the global standard of a 48-hour workweek and a maximum eight-hour workday in line with norms of the International Labour Organization. They allow flexibility in distributing those hours across different numbers of working days. However, they do not legalise the kind of extreme work schedules that are being casually recommended in the public discourse. The codes also require overtime to be voluntary and paid at twice the normal wage. They expand protections, such as minimum wages for all sectors, mandatory appointment letters, wider ESIC coverage, and recognition of commute-related accidents as workplace injuries. On paper, at least, this framework aims to strike a balance between flexibility for employers and security for workers.

But paper is one thing; practice is another. There are genuine anxieties around enforcement, especially in the unorganised sector and the rapidly expanding start-up world, where layoffs and burnout are already common. Allowing companies with up to 300 employees to hire and fire without government approval has also fuelled fears of greater precarity. This is why the public rhetoric of influential business leaders matters. When veterans publicly romanticise 72-hour or 90-hour workweeks, they send a powerful signal to companies that compromising labour rights is not only acceptable but also admirable. It undermines the spirit of the new labour codes before they have even taken root.

There is also a deeper moral question at play. When billionaires, who have long crossed the stage of worrying about rent, childcare, or EMIs, lecture young Indians on the virtues of extreme work regimes, it rings hollow. They are not making personal sacrifices; they are asking the young to make them. Calling this ‘patriotism’ is convenient, but the economic logic is brutally straightforward: more unpaid or underpaid hours mean lower labour costs and higher margins, especially in sectors where investors demand fast growth at any cost. The line between ambition and exploitation thus becomes thin.

So the real conversation India needs is not about whether we should work hard. We already do. The question is what kind of nation we want to build. One where GDP figures shine while the young — the very people we call our demographic dividend — collapse under chronic fatigue, anxiety, and fractured relationships? Or one where growth comes from better skills, thoughtful use of technology, well-designed workplaces, and humane working hours that allow people to live, learn, and thrive?

Both China’s reversal on the 996-work schedule and India’s decision to legally enforce a 48-hour workweek hint at the same truth: a country that burns out its young in the name of development is not moving forward. It is quietly eating away at its own future.

P. John J. Kennedy is former professor and dean, Christ University, Bengaluru