When Infosys co-founder
Narayana Murthy recently urged young Indians to embrace a 72-hour workweek, his comments rekindled a fierce debate — not least because he pointed to China’s infamous “996” work culture as a benchmark.
“9 am to 9 pm, six days a week – that’s 72 hours,” he said, arguing that for India to accelerate its growth, a similar ethic might be necessary.
Speaking in an interview, he justified his remark on extended working hours and said, “Last year, Catamaran senior and middle level staff went to China and they went to tier 1 cities, tier 2 cities and tier 3 cities. They stayed in tier-3 kind of hotels because we wanted to understand the real China. And you know there is a saying there, 9, 9, 6. You know what it means? 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week.”
Once celebrated for powering China’s tech miracle, the 996 model has since been denounced by employees, criticised by health experts and, in 2021, declared outright illegal by China’s top court.
But while Murthy frames 996 as a badge of discipline, China’s experience serves as a revealing case study of how far a nation can stretch its workforce—and where the limits eventually snap.
We take a look at how 996 came to be, and why it was banned:
What exactly is the 996 work culture?
The term “996” refers to a working schedule whereby employees put in their hours from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.
That adds up to 72 hours a week, far more than standard working hours in most countries.
This practice gained traction during China’s tech boom, especially in high-growth companies in e-commerce, internet, and startups.
For some leaders, it became a symbol: hustle, ambition, and non-stop growth.
How 996 became China’s unofficial tech timetable
The origins of 996 lie in the breakneck expansion of China’s tech sector during the 2010s. Tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com and countless high-growth startups were scaling at a pace unmatched anywhere in the world.
Companies were racing to dominate new markets and speed was often framed as the single most powerful competitive advantage.
In this environment, 996 organically became the accepted norm. Young professionals—many fresh graduates from China’s elite universities—internalised the idea that exceptional growth demanded exceptional commitment.
London-based Oliver Pearce, who worked in China for 15 years and is a managing director of communications advisory Corporate Perspectives, was quoted by Reuters as saying, “Many Chinese employees are desperate to succeed or need to preserve their incomes to sustain more aspirational lifestyles, so there are enough people in the workforce who will persist with these working hours”.
Founders like Jack Ma romanticised long hours as a badge of ambition by labelling working overtime as a ‘huge blessing’. They reinforced the narrative that extraordinary national progress required equally extraordinary personal sacrifice.
In return, employees hoped for rapid promotions, sizeable bonuses and in the most coveted roles, stock options that could multiply in value if the company went public.
While China’s labour laws already imposed clear limits on daily and weekly working hours, enforcement during those early boom years was uneven.
The combination of an expanding tech market, weak oversight and a cultural acceptance of overwork allowed 996 to emerge, unchallenged, as the unofficial industry standard.
Why the model eventually collapsed
By 2021, the Chinese government began pushing back strongly against the practice — not just in rhetoric, but legally.
Despite its initial momentum, 996 was inherently unsustainable. Over time, the intense pressure began to surface in troubling ways.
Reports of chronic burnout became common, with employees speaking openly about sleep deprivation, collapsing mental health, and the breakdown of work-life boundaries.
In 2021, a 22-year-old female employee of the e-commerce company Pingduoduo reportedly collapsed to her death while returning home from work after midnight, according to Reuters.
Several widely publicised cases of sudden deaths among overworked employees in the tech and logistics sectors triggered public outrage and brought national attention to the human cost of relentless schedules.
In 2019, this discontent crystallised in a symbolic act of digital protest. A group of Chinese tech workers created a GitHub repository titled “996.ICU”—a darkly humorous reference to the idea that “working 996 could land you in the ICU.”
The repository quickly went viral, compiling testimonies, naming companies that embraced the practice and attracting global attention to China’s culture of overwork. The movement marked one of the first organised, collective pushbacks against the country’s tech giants.
As Beijing launched its “common prosperity” campaign—a push aimed at curbing corporate excesses—the government began scrutinising labour practices more strictly.
This culminated in August 2021, when China’s Supreme People’s Court, along with the ministry of human resources and social security, issued a public statement explicitly declaring 996 to be a serious violation of labour law.
For the first time, the state formally acknowledged the model’s illegality, describing it as harmful to workers' physical and mental well-being.
Does that mean 996 has disappeared?
Not entirely. Declaring something illegal doesn’t instantly erase deep-rooted work cultures — enforcement is uneven and many firms still find workarounds.
Some companies rebranded their overtime policies under terms like "big week/small week" or “flexible hours” to skirt the 996 ban.
In recent years, leading firms such as Midea and DJI have instituted more formal clock-off policies and reduced mandatory overtime, but reports suggest many employees still work more than they officially should.
According to a 2025 Reuters report, average working weeks in China still exceed legal limits: official data indicated ~48.5 hours/week in early 2025, above the 44-hour cap.
A director at a renewable power firm in China, who asked not to be identified, was quoted by Reuters as saying that he routinely puts in even longer hours than the “996” schedule. “I work more hours than ‘996’ every week. I feel very, very tired,” he says.
Although his hours are technically flexible, he explains that he must work over 12 hours a day — without overtime pay — to hit his sales targets and earn a bonus. “My bonus accounts for 50% of my monthly salary,” he says, noting that the additional hours are put in voluntarily.
Thus, while the most extreme version of 996 has lost official sanction, elements of the overwork culture linger, shaped by competition, economic uncertainty and company-specific pressures.
In short: 996 may be “illegal,” but overwork hasn’t disappeared.
Working hours around the world: What the data shows
India’s current debate over long workweeks benefits from a wider global perspective. International data reveals a clear pattern: countries with shorter average working hours consistently produce higher output per worker.
Across much of Western Europe, for instance, employees work far fewer hours annually than their counterparts in Asia.
Eurostat, which tracks “actual working hours” in the EU, shows that as of 2024, employees in the Netherlands work only 32.1 hours/week on average, while Germany and Denmark come in at about 33.9 hours/week. These are not low-productivity nations — far from it.
The Netherlands, too, has one of the shortest workweeks while maintaining high living standards and strong economic performance.
By contrast, countries such as the United States and Japan work more hours on paper, but not enormously more.
According to the ILO, the US hits roughly 37.6 hours/week, which makes it approximately 1955 hours/year.
While in Japan, the figure was around 1,611 hours/year as of 2023, according to an OECD estimate.
These figures are still lower than some emerging economies that log more than 2,000 hours annually. For example, estimated data from Clockify (which aggregates global working-hour metrics) suggests that workers in China and India record much higher annual hours, ranging around 2400 hours/week. Indian workers—particularly those in informal sectors—often exceed that.
These comparisons challenge the assumption that longer hours inherently translate into higher productivity.
Actually, research shows the opposite in many cases. Productivity (measured as output per hour) exhibits diminishing returns beyond a certain point, especially when hours stretch past 45–50 per week.
Economists such as John Pencavel have long documented the diminishing returns of extra work hours. Beyond about 50 hours/week, productivity per hour drops sharply, and after 55 hours, more time often does not mean more output.
Recent work from Purdue University reinforces this, which reveals that while working long may boost performance in the short term, it impairs recovery and reduces next-day effectiveness.
This global trend has encouraged countries to experiment with shorter workweeks.
The UK, Japan, New Zealand and many more countries have conducted large-scale trials of the four-day week, and many reports indicate improvements in employee well-being and in some cases, even higher productivity due to better time management and reduced burnout.
What India can learn from China’s mistakes
India’s fascination with longer workweeks must be balanced against the lessons from China’s decade-long experiment with 996.
The first and most crucial insight is that longer hours do not guarantee higher productivity.
India already ranks among the countries with the longest workweeks, yet its productivity levels lag behind. As per the ILO, the average hours worked per week per employed person in India was 45.7 hours/week in 2024.
India’s labour productivity — measured as GDP per working hour — is around $8, placing it well below many other economies and reflecting a major efficiency gap, according to another recent ILO estimate.
In May 2025, Niti Aayog vice-chairman Suman Bery warned that India has the lowest labour productivity among G20 nations, which likely indicates that longer hours may not translate into proportional output.
Extending work hours without addressing inefficiencies will only exacerbate fatigue without meaningfully improving output.
Secondly, China’s experience shows that intense work cultures can create significant long-term liabilities—ranging from burnout and health issues to declining creativity and increased attrition.
These problems become structural as companies scale, ultimately forcing governments or markets to intervene.
Mohandas Pai, chairman of Aarin Capital and a renowned voice in the field, recently reacted to Murthy’s comments and said that such a work culture need not be for everyone, suggesting 9-9-6-style hours might apply for entrepreneurs or key innovators, not every worker.
“This is for a select group of innovators who want to build unicorns. Ordinary employees are not being asked to work 70 hours. Nobody is asking bank staff or people in offices to do this,” he said.
Thirdly, India’s own tech and startup sectors are already seeing the contours of an overwork culture. Long hours in early-stage startups, sales-heavy edtech firms, and logistics operations often mirror the early days of China’s tech boom, but with even fewer formal protections.
Without clear guidelines, India risks replicating the same trajectory that pushed China to reverse course.
Most importantly, India’s real challenge lies not in hours but in productivity, skills, technological adoption and managerial efficiency.
Priyanka Mukherjee, a senior assistant news editor in a leading organisation, says, “Absolutely. India’s challenge isn’t the number of hours people work. It’s the productivity we derive from those hours, the quality of skills, our ability to use technology intelligently and how efficiently our managers plan workflows.”
“Increasing hours doesn’t increase output, smarter systems do”, she added.
Hence, improving these areas—along with investing in worker well-being—will have far greater impact on national output than simply stretching the workday.
Conclusion
China’s 996 work culture stands as a powerful reminder that economic growth achieved through relentless hours eventually encounters hard limits. What drove early-stage expansion later became a source of public anger, legal battles and policy intervention.
As India charts its own path to higher productivity, the Chinese experience offers a crucial lesson. Sustainable growth comes not from the quantity of hours worked, but from the quality of work, the efficiency of systems and the well-being of the workforce.
As Swami Vivekananda said, “Learn everything that is good from others, but bring it in, and in your own way absorb it; do not become others.”
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