Late last year, Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy had kicked off a debate by suggesting young Indians be prepared to work 70 hours a week.

The Congress government in his home state now seems to have taken his advice to heart, angering trade union leaders.

The Karnataka government has proposed to raise the ceiling for daily shifts in the IT and ITeS sector effectively to 14 hours, prompting a trade union claiming to represent 20 lakh workers to warn of strong resistance.

Amendments have been proposed to the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act to increase the upper limit on regular daily shifts from 9 to 12 hours, excluding overtime. The current daily overtime limit is one hour above the 9 hours.

The draft amendment says: “An employee working in the IT/ ITeS/BPO sector may be required or allowed to work for more than 12 hours in a day and not exceeding 125 (extra) hours in three continuous months.”

Since a three-month period has 60-65 working days, given the five-day work weeks in the sector, 125 overtime hours means two extra hours a day, raising the effective ceiling for daily shifts to 14 hours.

Five-day weeks with 14-hour shifts comes to exactly 70-hour weeks.

The Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (Kitu), a part of CPM-affiliated Citu, has in a statement said: “Any attempt to go with the amendment will be an open challenge to the 20 lakh employees working in the IT/ITeS sector in Karnataka.”

Kitu general secretary Suhas Adiga told The Telegraph that “such long working hours would adversely impact the physical and mental health of workers and affect their work-life balance”.

Asked whether the state government may have been influenced by Narayana Murthy’s suggestion, Adiga said: “I cannot make a guess.”

Murthy had said he used to reach his office at 6.20am and leave at 8.30pm, often working 85-90 hours a week when it was a six-day work week until 1994.

Many corporate bosses had welcomed Murthy’s suggestion, among them Vinod Khosla, co-founder of the US-based Sun Microsystems, and Bhavish Agarwal, CEO of Ola Cabs.

Kitu said in a statement that the amendment would empower companies to change the current three-shift system to just two shifts since employees can be made to work 12 to 14 hours a day.

It accused the Karnataka government of neglecting employees’ fundamental rights to please corporate bosses.

“This amendment shows that the government of Karnataka is not ready to consider the workers as human beings who need personal and social life to survive. Instead it considers them as only a machinery to increase profit of the corporates to (sic) whom it serves,” the Kitu statement said.

At a meeting on the proposed amendment on Friday, Kitu leaders had highlighted studies that warned that extended working hours could severely harm workers’ health.

Labour minister Santosh Lad and officials from the labour and IT-BT (biotechnology) departments attended the meeting. After Kitu president V.J.K. Nair and Adiga objected to the proposed amendments, Lad promised a second meeting before any decision to tweak the law.

Nair alleged the government was acting under pressure from the IT industry. “While no one from the industry was present at the meeting, I saw some agents of theirs who usually liaise with the government on such matters,” he said.

At the meeting, Kitu leaders had cited a report by the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry that said 45 per cent of IT sector employees faced mental health issues such as depression, and 55 per cent had physical health issues.

“Increasing working hours will further aggravate this situation,” Kitu said in the statement.

It also flagged a WHO-International Labour Union study that says increased work hours can trigger an estimated 35 per cent higher risk of death by stroke and a 17 per cent higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease.

It added that the amendment comes at a time when the whole world has begun to agree that increased working hours can lead to declining productivity.