Last week, Supriya Sule, member of Parliament from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), introduced a private members’ bill in the Lok Sabha which ignited a heated discussion online. Typically, such bills are low on the pecking order, summarily discussed and dismissed in most instances, but the Right to Disconnect Bill 2025 touched a nerve among a range of stakeholders.
Sule, who had tabled a similar bill in 2018, reiterates and adds to its demand that employees be granted the legal right to refrain from answering work-related emails and phone calls when they are off duty without any fear of consequences. Recently, Kerala government introduced a similar private members’ bill, drawing on the provisions enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution (Right to Life and Dignity), Articles 38, 39 and 43 of the Directive Principles of state policy, along with protections against overreach as defined in existing labour laws.
Both bills argue that the right to disconnect would improve employee engagement by reducing burnout. According to an article published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry last year, 60% Indians face burnout at work. Earlier this year, the findings of another survey said that 72% of employees in India’s IT sector work over 70 hours instead of the 48-hour work week limit. None of this is news to anyone familiar with the unspoken rules of India Inc, where an always-on culture affect everyone, from interns to tenured leaders.
In theory, a Right to Disconnect Act would not only bring humane policies into the workplace but also improve business outcomes. Rested workers are likely to be more engaged and productive. They are less prone to making errors that may cost the company in revenue. But logic doesn’t stand a chance before the shibboleth of corporate dogma, which insists that workers must clock-in long hours to prove their worth. Even as memes on social media rip into the 70- and 90-hour workweek proposed by corporate leaders, in reality most people have little choice but to give in to such absurd demands. At the junior levels, working long hours and being always on are lauded as signs of commitment and, eventually, brownie points for career advancement. Going up the ladder, managers not only perpetuate the vicious cycle of destroying work-life balance for others, but also succumb to it themselves to justify their paychecks.
While countries like France, Singapore and Italy have implemented their versions of the Right to Disconnect, India lags woefully behind. Last year, the International Labour Organization ranked India second in its list of most overworked countries in the world. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the feudalistic mindset that corporations in India continue to harbour and entrench, especially for employees who work in hybrid or remote mode. In case of the latter, acute lack of trust has spawned tech-enabled surveillance tools that track every minute spent by employees.
Even anecdotally, a cursory survey of social media will show you scores of posts calling out toxic work behaviour every day—messages from managers denying leave, putting pressure on workers to log in despite personal emergencies, contacting colleagues out of office hours or on weekends and holidays. While Gen Z is speaking up against such lack of boundaries, they have an uphill battle ahead of them. Their managers, who were led to believe that not taking paid leave and being on call 24x7 were all part of the good karma that would lead to their elevation one day, have no other template to evaluate the work ethic of their juniors.
To add to the troubles fomented by antiquated mindsets, the incursion of AI into blue- and white-collar jobs is becoming a leading cause of workplace crises, especially lay-offs. Given this environment of chronic insecurity, with little to no accountability for fairness, how likely is it that the Right to Disconnect will bring about more than a cosmetic change to the system? In a complaint against a manager’s outburst at a colleague for not answering an important call on a Sunday morning, who do you think the HR team will side with?
None of these reservations are meant to deny the good intentions behind Sule’s bill. And yet, in a work culture, where the contract between workers and employers is fraught with deep-rooted imbalances and skewed power dynamics, a law advocating the Right to Disconnect is unlikely to make any immediate difference to the systems we have normalised and passed down the generations unless India Inc. decides to take a collective stand by itself.
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