Why Indian IT Companies Want Your Evenings, Your Weekends, and Eventually Your Health

It is 9:47 PM on a Wednesday. Your laptop is open on the dining table. Your food went cold an hour ago. Your manager sent a message at 9:15 asking for an update on the deployment, and you are typing the reply now, careful to sound calm, capable, and grateful for the opportunity. You are none of those things. You are tired in a way that sleep no longer fixes.

This is not exceptional. This is Tuesday through Sunday for a very large number of people working in Indian IT. The hours are a feature, not a malfunction.

The Man Who Told You to Work More

In October 2023, Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys, gave an interview where he said India's work productivity is one of the lowest in the world and that young people should work 70 hours a week to fix it. He said this was his personal recommendation. He said the nation's development depends on it.

He is 78 years old and has a net worth of over $4 billion.

The quote spread everywhere, and the responses split exactly along the lines you would expect. Older executives nodded approvingly. Younger employees, especially those already working those hours without the title or the pay to show for it, were furious. But the fury did not matter. The quote had already done its work. It gave ideological cover to every manager who was already doing exactly this, just without the public declaration.

Murthy was not alone. Larsen and Toubro chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan suggested 90-hour workweeks and asked, in what he seemed to think was a rhetorical flourish, what people would do sitting at home staring at their wives. Bombay Shaving Company CEO Shantanu Deshpande posted on LinkedIn urging freshers to "put their head down and grind" for four to five years and avoid what he called "woke culture." The applause from senior professionals in the comments was immediate.

What these men have in common, besides the obvious, is that none of them will suffer the consequences of the advice they are giving. The 70-hour week costs them nothing. It costs you your evenings, your health, and eventually, if it goes on long enough, your sense of who you are outside of work.

How the Star Performer System Works Against You

Indian IT companies have a performance rating system that is sold as meritocratic. Work hard, perform well, get rated highly, get rewarded. The logic sounds clean. The actual mechanics are something different.

The bell curve is real. In a standard distribution model, a certain percentage of employees will be rated average or below average regardless of absolute performance. Companies like TCS, Infosys, and Wipro have used forced ranking for years. If your team is genuinely strong, someone still has to sit at the bottom of that curve. The bottom of the curve means smaller increments, no promotion, and sometimes a conversation about "performance improvement" that is really a conversation about the door.

This creates a specific kind of anxiety that has nothing to do with whether you are actually good at your job. You are not competing against a standard. You are competing against your colleagues. And the easiest way to win that competition is to be visibly available. Answer messages on weekends. Volunteer for the 11 PM production call. Be the person who "goes the extra mile," which is corporate language for the person willing to give away their time for free.

Visibility becomes performance. Presence signals commitment. And since everyone around you is playing the same game, the baseline keeps shifting upward. What was impressive two years ago is now the minimum. The person who logs off at 7 PM looks, in comparison, like someone who is not serious about their career.

The system does not ask you to sacrifice your time. It builds the conditions where you choose to sacrifice your time, and then congratulates you for your dedication.

The Unpaid Overtime Nobody Calls Unpaid

IT services companies in India sell labor to clients, primarily in the US and Europe, on a time-and-materials or fixed-price basis. The billing is per hour or per deliverable. The employee cost is their fixed salary. The math is straightforward: every additional hour an employee works without additional pay is pure margin for the company.

Indian IT operates on some of the highest EBITDA margins in the global services industry. TCS posted operating margins above 24% in recent years. Infosys and Wipro are similar. A meaningful portion of those margins is funded by hours worked beyond what any employment contract specifies, dressed up as culture, as commitment, as what it means to be a "go-getter."

Nobody calls it unpaid overtime. The language is always softer. You are "going above and beyond." You are "showing ownership." You are "being a team player." These phrases are not neutral descriptions. They are the mechanism by which companies transfer the cost of their profit margins onto the personal time of people who have mortgages to pay and do not feel in a position to push back.

The contract says 9 to 6. The expectation is 9 to whenever. And if you leave at 6, consistently, reliably, the way someone with a healthy relationship to work would, you will feel it in your rating. You will feel it in whether your manager mentions your name when a good project comes up. The contract is a document. The real terms are unwritten and enforced through social pressure and the threat of being seen as someone who is not committed enough.

What Wipro Did to Its Moonlighters

In 2022, Wipro fired 300 employees for moonlighting. The company's executive chairman, Rishad Premji, called it "a complete ethical violation." He said this plainly, publicly, with the confidence of someone who had never needed a second income stream to feel financially safe.

Moonlighting, for context, means working a second job or freelance project outside of your primary employment. In most parts of the world, this is a normal thing adults do. In Indian IT, it became a flashpoint.

The timing matters. The firings happened during a period when the industry was publicly debating whether employees had any right to their own time outside of office hours. The answer Wipro gave was clear: no. Your evenings and weekends belong to your employer, even if your employer is not paying you for them. The company did not want those hours. It just did not want anyone else to have them either.

The message underneath the message was this: your labor is the company's asset to manage, not yours. You are not a person with skills who has chosen to sell some portion of your time to an employer. You are a resource, and resources do not have side projects.

Other companies scrambled to define their moonlighting policies after Wipro. Some softened their positions publicly. The surveillance did not soften. If anything, the conversation normalized the idea that companies have legitimate interests in how their employees spend the hours they are not being paid for.

The EMI That Makes You Compliant

Here is the part that is hardest to say out loud, because it implicates everyone in the system, including the people being harmed by it.

The Indian IT industry, for all its dysfunction, pays well relative to most other employment options available to a 25-year-old from a middle-class family in Pune or Chennai or Hyderabad. It pays well enough that you can get a home loan in your twenties. You can buy a car. You can send money home. You can build the material life that your parents worked themselves into the ground hoping you would have.

The loan officer at the bank does not ask you how many hours you work. The EMI does not care that you are exhausted. The obligation is fixed, and it arrives on the same date every month, regardless of how you feel about your manager.

Companies understand this. The entire structure of how IT employment works in India, the large cohort hiring, the campus placement culture, the promise of "package" as the primary metric of success, feeds young people into financial commitments before they are old enough to understand what those commitments will cost them in autonomy. By the time you understand the terms of the deal, you have already signed.

A person with a home loan and a family depending on them does not easily quit. A person who cannot easily quit does not easily push back. This is not a coincidence. The financial architecture of middle-class aspiration in India is also, structurally, a compliance mechanism. The EMI is not a trap in some dramatic sense. It is just a fact that makes you easier to manage.

What It Does to Your Body Over Time

The data on chronic overwork is not ambiguous. A study published in The Lancet found that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease compared to working 35 to 40 hours. A World Health Organization and International Labour Organization analysis estimated that 745,000 deaths per year are attributable to overwork-related cardiovascular disease and stroke.

The psychological effects accumulate more quietly. Burnout is now a recognized occupational syndrome in the WHO's International Classification of Diseases. It is characterized by exhaustion, increasing mental detachment from work, and reduced professional efficacy. In plain terms: you stop caring, you stop feeling, and then you stop performing, the thing the system wanted from you all along.

Indian IT employees report some of the highest rates of burnout in surveys of global knowledge workers. This is not because Indian people are uniquely fragile. It is because the hours are genuinely extreme and the systems designed to extract those hours are genuinely sophisticated.

The body keeps a ledger. Every night cut short, every weekend swallowed, every vacation answered with emails gets recorded somewhere. The invoice arrives later, in ways that are harder to connect back to the source. High blood pressure at 34. Anxiety that does not have a clear object. A marriage under strain that you attribute to personality differences rather than to the fact that neither of you has had an uninterrupted evening together in eight months.

The Language That Makes It Invisible

None of this is described honestly in the environments where it happens. The vocabulary of Indian corporate culture has been carefully developed to make exploitation sound like opportunity.

Ownership means your problem to solve, including on weekends. Passion means willing to work for the same pay but more hours. Culture fit means comfortable being on call. Growth mindset means do not complain when the scope expands without the compensation. High-performing team means a team where people are afraid to leave on time.

This language is not accidental. It takes something coercive and makes it sound like a personal virtue you are either demonstrating or failing to demonstrate. If you are tired and burned out, the framework is available to blame yourself. You were not resilient enough. You did not manage your time well. You let your work-life balance slip, as though the balance was yours to control and not systematically dismantled by the organization you work for.

The person who says they love what they do and works 80 hours a week is celebrated. The person who says they did good work and went home at 6 is, at best, tolerated. The celebration is not about the quality of the output. It is about the signal the hours send. The signal is: I am yours. I have subordinated my life to this company's needs. I can be relied upon to give more than what was agreed.

What You Are Left With

There is no clean ending to this. The 70-hour week advocates are not going to stop. The forced curve is not going anywhere. The EMI will still come on the same date next month. Wipro is not the last company that will fire people for existing outside of work hours, and Narayana Murthy is not the last billionaire who will tell people half his age to work harder for a fraction of his reward.

What I want to say, and what I think most people working in this industry already know but rarely hear said plainly, is this: the exhaustion you feel is not a personal failing. It is the correct response to a system that is designed to take more than it gives. Your body is not broken. It is reporting accurately.

The productivity these companies need from you, they are getting. The evenings they want from you, they are taking. The health they are spending, that is yours to lose. There is no pooled retirement fund for the years subtracted from the ends of your life. The company will post its quarterly results. You will get a certificate that says "Star Performer" and a 6% increment that does not keep pace with inflation.

And somewhere, a 78-year-old man with more money than you will ever see will give another interview suggesting the problem is that you are not working hard enough.