LucknowDecember 6, 2025 07:07 AM IST
First published on: Dec 6, 2025 at 07:07 AM IST
“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.”
The slogan popularised by the 19th-century labour movement encapsulated the struggle to shape the modern idea of the eight-hour workday, a standard that continues to influence notions of work and leisure across much of the world.
However, with work culture undergoing a big shift in a hyper-connected and globalised world, and amid employers increasingly encroaching on employees’ leisure time, countries such as France, Portugal, and Australia have enacted their right to disconnect.
In India, one of its biggest advocates is NCP (SP) MP Supriya Sule who on Friday introduced a Private Members’ Bill in the Lok Sabha that proposes employees should be allowed not to entertain work-related calls and emails outside work hours. Sule had introduced a similar Private Members’ Bill in 2019, too.
Sule was joined by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor who introduced the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which seeks to limit work hours, secure the right to disconnect, and establish grievance redress and mental-health support systems.
Sule’s Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, seeks to recognise the right to disconnect as a way to reduce stress and ease tension between an employee’s personal and professional lives. Referring to a World Economic Forum report, the “Objects and Reasons” of the Bill introduced by the Baramati MP says, “Studies have found that if an employee is expected to be available round the clock, they tend to exhibit risks of overwork like sleep deprivation, developing stress, and being emotionally exhausted. This persistent urge to respond to calls and e-mails (termed as ‘telepressure’), constant checking of e-mails throughout the day, and even on weekends and holidays, is reported to have destroyed to work-life balance of employees. According to a study, the constant monitoring of work-related messages and e-mails may overtax employees’ brains, leading to a condition called ‘info-obesity’.”
Among other things, the Bill proposes that:
- While the employer may contact the worker after work hours, the employee is not obliged to reply and shall have the right to refuse to answer such calls. For doing so, an employee cannot be subject to any disciplinary action.
• An Employees’ Welfare Authority must be set up to confer every employee with the right to disconnect from work-related telephone calls and emails beyond work hours and on holidays.
• The Authority must conduct a baseline study to collect comprehensive data about workers’ usage of digital and communication tools outside work hours.
• The Authority shall direct every company with more than 10 workers to negotiate with them, unions, or their representatives to decide the terms and conditions for working outside the work hours and they should be entitled to overtime at the normal wage rate.
• The government, in consultation with companies, must provide counselling services to employees to help them maintain work-life balance and should also set up digital detox centres.
• Penalty — 1% of employees’ total remuneration — to be paid by companies for non-compliance.
In September, Kerala Congress (M) MLA Dr N Jayaraj had proposed the Kerala Right to Disconnect Bill, also a Private Members’ Bill, to legislate on the issue, triggering online debates.
Private Members’ Bills, which are taken up on Fridays when Parliament is in session, are notoriously difficult to pass, with only 14 having become law to date. Six of the 14 Bills became law in 1956 and the last one to receive parliamentary approval was the Supreme Court (Enlargement of Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction) Bill, 1968, on August 9, 1970.