Narayana Murthy wants you to put in more hours at work

Infosys Chairman Narayana Murthy's views on India's work culture didn’t go quite well with many.

Transcript

00:00India's work productivity is one of the lowest in the world.

00:03Our youngsters must say,

00:05I want to work 70 hours a week.

00:30Somehow, our youth have the habit of taking

00:58not so desirable habits from the West and then not helping the country.

01:09India's work productivity is one of the lowest in the world.

01:14Unless we improve our work productivity, unless we reduce corruption in the government, you

01:22know, at some level, because we have been reading, I don't know the truth of it,

01:28unless we improve or unless we reduce the delays in our bureaucracy in taking decision,

01:38we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress.

01:46So therefore, my request is that our youngsters must say, this is my country.

01:55I want to work 70 hours a week.

01:58You know, this is exactly what Germans and Japanese did after the Second World War.

02:03Yes.

02:04The German leader, he sat down with the German leaders, corporate leaders, and he said, we

02:09have to rebuild and that's your job.

02:13And they made sure that every German worked extra hours for a certain number of years.

02:20So I hope our leaders too will be able to, when I say leaders, corporate leaders too

02:26will be able to address our youngsters and say, for the first time, India has received

02:35certain respect.

02:37This is the time for us to consolidate and accelerate the progress.

02:42And for doing that, we need to work very hard.

02:46We need to be disciplined and improve our work productivity.

02:51I think unless we do that, what can poor government do?

02:56Every government is as good as the culture of the people.

03:00And our culture has to change to that of highly determined, extremely disciplined and extremely

03:09hardworking people.

03:11And that transformation has to come to youngsters because youngsters form a significant majority

03:20of our population at this point of time.

03:23And they are the ones who can build our country, you know, with gusto.