Why labour productivity in India stays below par

In a recent interview, Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy was asked for his views on progress achieved in independent India on the occasion of India@75. 

- Jesim Pais

Among the many challenges India faced, according to Murthy, was low work productivity and how this resulted in low incomes for a large section of the Indian population. Murthy suggested the way forward was for the youth to be disciplined, and work hard and long hours for the next 20 to 30 years. He compared present-day India with postWorld War II Germany and Japan and claimed how corporate leaders in both countries were involved in making people work extra hours to rebuild their economies.

Apart from the problem of suggesting 70 hours of work per week, there is also a problem with this comparison. Both Japan and Germany were imperial powers, heavily industrialised before that war. What needed to be done in their case was to rebuild their respective economies destroyed by the war. This is very different from what we have in India today. We are not rebuilding our economy or our industry. We have repeatedly failed to build industry and industrialise in the required scale in the first place.

In other words, both Germany and Japan were already very high work-productivity economies before the war and at the end of the war what they did was use these high levels of work-productivity to rebuild their countries. The extra hours that they put in, assuming this is correct, would only quicken the process of rebuilding.