How many hours should a person work in a week? NR Narayana Murthy, former chairman of Infosys and public intellectual, says 70 hours. That’s nearly 12 hours a day. Given that commuting to work in urban India can take two hours a day, a person will be away from home for 14 hours. Add seven to eight hours of sleep, and 21 of 24 hours in a day would be gone, leaving three to four hours a day of free time during Monday-Saturday. Clearly, Murthy was talking about men and women without any commitments outside of their work. Unfortunately, most people have families and would probably prefer a better work-leisure balance. It is important for societal outcomes to have that balance.

There is another problem with what Murthy thinks ought to pass for hard work, namely, millions already work 12 hours a day if not more. This is distressingly true of women because they take care of the home, even when they are employed outside the home. Much of this work is not reflected in productivity figures because either it is unpaid work or, if paid for, it’s in the informal sector. That is, either there is nothing to measure or if there is, it isn’t measured.

These problems aside, Murthy’s remarks point to another conceptual confusion. Which is that output and time are not hugely proportional. In other words, more time spent at the place of work does not necessarily mean higher output. Had it meant that, our farmers would have had very high productivity. After all, they spend virtually all their time on the farm but work effectively on it only for a few hours a day. It’s simply the nature of their work. What this shows is that productivity is a function not just of time but also capital. A farmer without proper tools can work 12 hours a day and achieve only a third of what a farmer with an iron plough does. The problem, therefore, is producing capital. There are many brain-based activities where the intellectual capital that’s required is produced by education imparted by institutions funded by the government. The benefit then goes to activities such as medicine, law, architecture — and IT. Without the IITs, Infosys would probably have had to import the skills that it needs. It would have been a non-starter as a business.

It should be evident from this that it’s output or work efficiency that matters, not time spent at the place of work. The Hindi expression for this sau lohar ki, ek sonar ki, meaning the value that an ironsmith adds with a hundred blows is equal to what a goldsmith adds with one gentle tap. The short point is that Indians don’t need to work 12 hours a day to work harder. That said, Murthy is absolutely right that Indians need to work harder and quite wrong in equating that with longer hours.