From Working Hours to Cognitive Labour: Examining India’s Proposed Right to Disconnect

Himesh Thakur and Vaibhav Mishra| 10 Apr

I. Introduction: Between Data Revolution and the Digital Leash

In 2016, the Indian workforce has seen a seismic change commonly referred to as the “Jio Effect”, in which the data price crash that dropped from less than Rs.10 per GB which democratized smartphone data access but also bound the employees in a situation where they are tied to their devices 24/7.¹ ² This continuous connectedness was solidified further with the COVID-19 pandemic that somewhat broke the physical barriers of the office and institutionalised the principle of “Work From Home” as a new condition of being available.³ This has led to an epidemic of what has been termed as invisible overtime by Indian professionals, with researches showing that Indian workers are recording an average of 2,195 working hours a year which is extremely high compared to their global counterparts in places such as Hamburg which records an average of 1,473 hours.⁴ This “telepressure” culture (the psychological desire to answer work notifications immediately) has practically made the notion of being off-duty an out-dated phenomenon.

With the aim to avert this crisis, a private member’s bill was reintroduced in Lok Sabha on 5^th December 2025, by MP Supriya Sule who previously tabled this bill in 2019.⁵ The Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 aims to legally empower employees to disregard after-hours work related communication and proposes the mandatory establishment of welfare authorities to avoid any disciplinary action against those who opt to disconnect.⁶ The legislation tries to make the ‘privilege of rest’ a ‘statutory right’ by proposing fines on non-compliance of up to 1% of the overall remuneration of employees, something that is expected to come at a high cost to the culture of hard hustle of the corporate enterprise of India.⁷

II. The Legislative Framework: Interpretation of the Bill

The Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, which was reintroduced by MP Supriya Sule, is a radical reorganization of the employer-employee social contract. The Bill, which is no longer based on the ‘working hours based’ logic of the Factories Act, 1948 (now Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions, 2020), is an effort to control the concept of cognitive labor, allowing employees a statutory right to disregard work-related calls and emails outside of designated work hours without any fear of consequences. At the core of this Legislative Framework is the creation of an “Employees Welfare Authority”, which is proposed to be the regulatory body, that oversees compliance and releases data of digital overreach, essentially making digital intrusion a quantifiable factor at the workplace.⁸

The Bill’s real strength lies in its compliance enforcement and penalty structure. The bill shifts the balance of power of an establishment to collective bargaining instead of individual bargaining as the Bill requires an establishment with over 10 employees to form an “Employees’ Welfare Committee”,⁹ which will be involved in negotiating certain out-of-work procedures.¹⁰ Most importantly, the bill suggests a strict liability approach under which those companies which do not write these charters or comply with the disconnect rules are supposed to pay a fine of 1 percent of their gross employee remuneration¹¹, which is quite significant to prevent even large MNCs to consider disobedience a cost of doing business. Also, in case an employee agrees to work after office hours, the Bill requires the employee to be paid at the overtime wage rate thus making even ‘a quick email’ legally considered as billable labor or paid work.¹² ¹³

III. The Global Precedents of Comparative Public Law

In order to ascertain the legal feasibility of the Indian Bill, we shall look at the global jurisprudence of ‘Right to Disconnect’, which is broadly divided into two theories, the “Negotiation Model” and the “Prohibition Model”. France was the first country to recognise this right and it followed the Negotiation model under the “El Khomri Law” (Article L. 2242-17 of the Labour Code) in 2017, which does not prohibit contact after hours but mandates the companies with more than 50 workers that they agree on a ‘charter of good conduct’ on digital tools.¹⁴ ¹⁵ On the other hand, in 2021, Portugal implemented a more authoritarian and stricter approach of the Prohibition Model, it amended its labor code and made it explicitly unlawful when employers are contacting staff outside of work hours,¹⁶ and also offered a fine of up to EUR 10,000 for each offence. This strict liability approach here considers an after-hours text message as similar to a physical trespass of the private space of the employee.

For India, however, the most relevant template relating to the common law system is the Australian one. The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 has introduced a more subtle Right to Disconnect which is assessed based on a “Reasonableness Test”.¹⁷ In contrast to the Portuguese prohibition, the Australian legislation permits employees to refuse contact as long as such a refusal is not unreasonable, a conclusion determined by the Fair Work Commission makes depending on seniority and personal factors of an employee and the urgency of the activity.¹⁸ This flexibility resembles the Ontario Model in the Working for Workers Act, 2021 of Canada, which mandates employers to prepare written disconnection policies but does not go as far as to prohibit it outright as an expression of a globalized economy, where clock-watching can be impractical.¹⁹

IV. Critical Review: The Tug-of-War Between Welfare and Pragmatism

In order to assess the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, one has to deal with the conflict between two competing interests of Constitutional Right to Life and the Right to Trade that is the Economic one. In this section, the reasons why the Bill is a legal necessity but also a practical emergency are discussed.

A. The Jurisprudential Necessity: The Silence as the Fundamental Right

The best point in support of such a Bill is not only the labour welfare, but compliance with the Constitution. According to the judgment in the case of Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India,²⁰ the Supreme Court concluded that the Right to Privacy is inherent in Article 21. Privacy does not imply only data protection, but also entails spatial privacy which is the right to be left alone and to enjoy a sanctuary where the state (or in this case the employer) cannot invade. An employer, who invades a house at 10 PM digitally, is arguably infringing this constitutional limit. When an employer intrudes digitally into a home at 10 PM, they are arguably violating this constitutional boundary. Moreover, the issue of mental health crisis in corporate India is no longer an individual problem and turned into a legal burden. A survey in 2023 by the McKinsey Health Institute revealed that the symptoms of burnout in the Indian employees stands highest globally at 59%.²¹ Lawyers claim, that now ‘telepressure’ falls under ‘Workplace Hazard’ under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020.²² By not preventing after-hours contact, the employer can potentially be in breach of the obligation to ensure a ‘safe working environment’, and thus can be sued under the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which promotes the right to protection against cruel or degrading treatment.²³

B. Quagmire of Implementation: Law without Teeth?

The Bill maybe constitutionally sound but its economic implementation comes with a lot of contradictions. The first one is the Global Backend Dilemma. The Indian IT-BPM segment that generates more than 7.4 % of the Indian GDP works mostly in the US and the UK time zone. The policy of strict disconnection will undermine the competitiveness of India as the 24/7 back office of the world. When an Indian team is not able to answer an emergency of a US client due to the fact that it is 8 PM in Bengaluru, a business can just shift to the Philippines or Vietnam where labour laws are more flexible.

The weakest aspect of the Bill, legally, is the definition of the term Emergency. The majority of Right to Disconnect laws have provisions of exceptions on urgent business necessities. In pressure-filled sectors such as corporate law, investment banking or start-ups, every activity is presented as an emergency. In the absence of a strict statutory definition of what amounts to an emergency, this exception will most probably devour the rule. A junior associate can hardly challenge a senior partner on how urgency is defined at midnight and this makes the law effective on paper and toothless on the ground because power disparities in the Indian workplaces are so high.

Lastly, the Bill threatens to generate a Two-Tier Workforce. It is mainly applicable to the formal sector, which involves disregarding the 80 % of the Indian labour force in the informal sector or gig economy (e.g., Zomato/Swiggy delivery partners) which is also regulated by algorithms that require hyper-availability.²⁴ Keeping the white-collar elite and abusing the blue-collar gig worker to the dangers of algorithmic surveillance, the Bill could also contribute to the further polarisation of labour rights, albeit unintentionally.

V. Conclusion: The Way Forward – Between Prohibition and Protocol

Although the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 being an important reflection of the toxicity of corporate culture in the Indian context of being available all-the-time, has a difficult journey to the statute. It is historically known that the Private Member’s Bills are rarely passed into law; nevertheless, their main benefit is the sparking of the required discussion. The dichotomy of a complete prohibition of communication and the unrestricted access is not true. The realistic solution to India is the mid-way to compulsory transparency.

Rather than having a strict statutory ban, which is inconsistent with global business demands, India can revise the Industrial Relations Code, 2020²⁵ to mandate Communication Charters. Such charters would compel employers to clearly specify in employment agreements what will be considered as after-hours work and how it would be remunerated, and the needle would shift out of prohibition and towards informed consent. Finally, to ensure that the Indian economy grows successfully without consuming its engine (the workforce) it is necessary to understand that the ‘off switch’ is not an adversary of productivity, but the key to sustainability.

1
Impact of Reliance’s Entry: A Socio-Economic Analysis of Jio-fication and India’s GDP story, Institute for Competitiveness (Mar. 13, 2018), https://competitiveness.in/impact-of-reliance-entry/
2
Shona Ghosh, How the ‘Jio effect’ brought millions of Indians online and is reshaping Silicon Valley and the internet, Business Insider (14 July 2020), https://www.businessinsider.com/reliance-jio-millions-of-indians-online-reshaped-internet- 2019-8
3
Garima Gupta, Radhika A. Jadhav, M. Nataraj & G. A. Maiya, Effect of COVID-19 Lockdown/Compulsory Work From Home (WFH) Situation on Musculoskeletal Disorders in India, 33 J. Bodywork & Movement Therapies 39 (2023), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1360859222001280
4
Zulekha Shakoor Rajani, Workers’ Day or Workers’ Plight? The Hidden Cost of India’s Hustle Culture, The Companion (May 1, 2025), https://thecompanion.in/workers-day-or-workers-plight-the-hidden-cost-of-indias-hustle-culture/
5
“Right to Disconnect Bill Introduced in Parliament,” Sanskriti IAS (8 Dec. 2025), https://www.sanskritiias.com/current-affairs/right-to-disconnect-bill-introduced-in-parliament
6
Hency Thacker, Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025: Is India Finally Ready to Switch Off After Work?, The CSR Journal (Dec. 8, 2025), https://thecsrjournal.in/right-to-disconnect-bill-2025-is-india-finally-ready-to-switch-off-after-work- supriya-sule-loksabha-parliament/
7
No Calls, Emails After Office Hours: Why the Right to Disconnect Bill 2025 Has Sparked Buzz and When It Will Become a Law, The Economic Times (Dec. 7, 2025), https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabha/india/no-calls-emails-after-office-hours-heres-what-the-right-to-disconnect-bill-2025-says-and-when-it-will- become-a-law/articleshow/125814048.cms
8
Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, SCC Online (Dec. 10, 2025), https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2025/12/10/right-to-disconnect-bill-2025/
9
Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, § 12
10
Samriddhi Srivastava, What India’s Right to Disconnect Bill Means and How Other Countries Acted First, People Matters (Dec. 9, 2025), https://www.peoplematters.in/news/economy-policy/what-indias-right-to-disconnect-bill-means- and-how-other-countries-acted-first-47579
11
Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, § 19
12
Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, § 11
13
Niyati Kothiyal, What’s in Supriya Sule’s Right to Disconnect Bill and How Have Other Countries Tackled Work-Life Balance?, ThePrint (Dec. 8, 2025), https://theprint.in/india/whats-in-supriya-sules-right-to-disconnect-bill-how-have- other-countries-tackled-work-life-balance/2800566/
14
The Right to Logout Offers Protection for the Employee and the Employer, YDES (Dec. 2025), https://www.ydes.com/en/the-right-to-logout-offers-protection-for-the-employeeand-the-employer/
15
Mark Bell, Marta Lasek-Markey, Alan Eustance & Thomas Pahlen, A Right to Disconnect: Irish and European Legal Perspectives, (unpublished manuscript, 2021), ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355476200_A_Right_to_Disconnect_Irish_and_European_Legal_Persp ectives
16
Julia Horowitz & Vasco Cotovio, In Portugal, It’s Now Illegal for Your Boss to Call Outside Work Hours, CNN (Nov. 11, 2021), https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/11/success/portugal-employer-contact-law
17
Right to Disconnect Fact Sheet, Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (Australia) (July 26, 2024), https://www.dewr.gov.au/download/16162/right-disconnect/38654/right-disconnect/pdf
18
Angus Thompson, What Is the Right to Disconnect? A Bluffer’s Guide to the New Laws About Getting Contacted After Hours, The Sydney Morning Herald (Feb. 7, 2024), https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/what-is-the-right-to- disconnect-a-bluffer-s-guide-to-the-new-laws-about-getting-contacted-after-hours-20240207-p5f32b.html
19
Working for Workers Act, 2021, S.O. 2021, c. 35 (Can.).
20
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1
21
Reframing Employee Health: Moving Beyond Burnout to Holistic Health, McKinsey & Company (2025), https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/reframing-employee-health-moving-beyond-burnout-to-holistic- health
22
Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, No. 13, Acts of Parliament, 2020 (India)
23
Sheena Ogra & Aashima Gusain, Mental Health at the Workplace, Ahlawat & Associates (2025), https://www.ahlawatassociates.com/blog/mental-health-at-the-workplace
24
Right to Disconnect Bill: India’s Push for Digital Well-Being, CMA Knowledge (Dec. 2025), https://www.cmaknowledge.in/2025/12/right-to-disconnect-bill-indias-push-for-digital-well-being.html
25
Industrial Relations Code, 2020, No. 35, Acts of Parliament, 2020 (India)

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From Working Hours to Cognitive Labour: Examining India’s Proposed Right to Disconnect

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