On October 26, at the India-Netherlands Business Forum in The Hague, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal made Dutch investors an offer few European governments could match. “Nobody in India will tell you it’s five o’clock,” he said, before adding the clincher. No Indian, he assured them, “will ever remind you it’s the weekend.” His hosts come from a country where the average working week is around 31.6 hours. One imagines them nodding politely, the way one nods at a man explaining why his house has no doors.The clip travelled faster than any bill through the Lok Sabha, which, as we shall see, is a low bar. Harsh Goenka, who last year mocked the 90-hour week by suggesting Sunday be renamed “Sun-duty”, now found a serious point in the minister’s remark. Industrialists, it seems, keep flexible hours on their principles too.A sermon we have heard beforeGoyal is the third preacher in three years. In 2023, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy urged young Indians to work 70 hours a week. Larsen & Toubro’s chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan then raised the bid to 90, Sundays included, and asked his staff, “How long can you stare at your wife?” I disagreed with both. But both were describing their own lives to people who had chosen to work for them. Whereas Goyal was describing someone else’s working day, to buyers. And he belongs to the one profession in India whose attendance register would not survive a Dutch HR audit.The house that rarely sitsThe first Lok Sabha sat an average of 135 days a year. The 17th, which ran from 2019 to 2024, managed 55, with 274 MPs sittings across five years, the fewest of any full-term house. Of the 15 sessions, 11 were adjourned early, cancelling 40 scheduled sittings. A clerk who skipped 40 scheduled days would not be offered a pay commission. He would be shown the door.During this year’s monsoon session, by PRS Legislative Research’s count, the Lok Sabha functioned for 17.5 hours, or 15% of its scheduled time. The government’s own figure, from the Parliamentary Affairs Minister, was a scarcely prouder 19%. Question hour ran for about nine minutes across the entire session, and nine of the 11 Bills passed went through without any debate.Put that in the minister’s own currency. A software engineer working the Indian average of 46.7 hours a week would match the Lok Sabha’s entire monsoon output before Wednesday’s breakfast. Murthy’s patriotic 70-hour youngster would be done by Tuesday lunch.This is not one party’s sin, and that is precisely the point. In the 2010 winter session, with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in office and the BJP demanding a joint-parliamentary committee on 2G spectrum allocation, the two houses spent 5 and 2% of their time on legislative business. The script never changes; only the actors swap benches. One side blockades, the other bulldozes and both draw the same allowances. States are worse: MLAs sit, on average, for about 24 days a year. Nagaland’s attendance was estimated at seven.Defenders will say an MP’s real work happens in committees and constituencies. Yet the 17th Lok Sabha referred just 16% of bills to committees, against 71% in the 14th. A cut ribbon is not a scrutinised budget.Now, to the countries we say we are racing towards. Britain’s House of Commons sits about 150 days a year, Japan’s Diet is bound by law to a 150-day ordinary session every year, and Germany’s Bundestag, where attendance on sitting days is compulsory, about 104. We quote their incomes when we speak of Viksit Bharat by 2047. We have borrowed the targets and left the attendance registers on the plane.The arkati’s pitchI spent part of my childhood in Fiji, among the descendants of the girmitiyas, the Indians shipped out under indenture to cut cane for the empire. The family stories I heard were rarely about skill. They were about endurance, and about the arkati, the recruiter who sold the passage to Fiji in a village in Bihar or the United Provinces, said little about the conditions, collected fee per head, and never boarded the ship.So, are India’s politicians the new slave sellers? No. Slavery was a crime of another order, and borrowing its name cheapens those who endured it. The arkati is the closer cousin: a man who markets other people’s stamina at a discount and never has to live inside the bargain.Why does the pitch come so easily? Psychology offers clues. One is system justification, our tendency to defend the existing order and recast its hardships as virtues. If you rose by slogging, slogging must be how anyone rises. Another is our habit of reading visible busyness as a sign of importance, regardless of results. A politician’s life is crowded with exertion: rallies, inaugurations, a phone that never sleeps. He can feel genuinely exhausted while belonging to an institution that worked 15% of its scheduled time.A third is generational. Many of today’s ministers grew up in an India of ration cards, and childhood scarcity leaves a lasting mark on how adults weigh the present against the future. Any job was a gift; any boundary looked like ingratitude. A man with a driver, a cook and a government doctor on call does not experience the weekend as the only window in which to sleep, visit an ageing parent or get his cholesterol checked.A generation that has done the arithmeticAbout 65% of Indians are under 35. They are not lazy. They are numerate. They watched the death of a 26-year-old EY employee in 2024 turn into a national argument about overwork and a labour ministry inquiry. They read the same data the minister’s officials do.They also know what happened in South Korea. In 2023, Seoul proposed raising the weekly cap from 52 hours to 69. Young workers and unions pushed back so hard that the government was forced to rethink within days, and even the ruling party’s new leader called the plan excessive. The Korean young were not rejecting work. They were refusing to be a line item in someone else’s growth model.Also read: Who Is Piyush Goyal to Say That Working Indians Don’t Need Rest?The irony is that Goyal’s own pitch, in a reel aimed at foreign capital, described India’s young as aspirational and “looking for a better quality of life”. He then offered that quality of life to investors as the discount.The heart keeps accountsI trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon before I moved into public health, and the operating theatre teaches you one lesson early. The heart keeps accounts, and it always collects.The evidence is not subtle. A World Health Organisation and International Labour Organisation analysis in the peer-reviewed journal Environment International estimated that working 55 hours or more a week caused 398,000 deaths from stroke and 347,000 from heart disease in 2016, weighing heaviest on South-East Asia. Such hours carried a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease than a 35 to 40 hour week. Half of India’s workforce already puts in more than 49 hours a week.Nor do the extra hours buy much. The Stanford economist John Pencavel found that beyond a threshold, output barely rises, so a 70-hour week yields little more than a 56-hour one, and that losing the weekly day of rest was particularly damaging. The minister is selling hours that yield mostly cortisol.Now look ahead. India’s population aged 60 and above is projected to double to 347 million, or 20.8% of the country, by 2050, and older Indians are expected to outnumber children by 2046. Among those already over 60, the government’s “Longitudinal Ageing Study in India” found about 32% reporting hypertension and 14.2% diabetes. The 26-year-old whose weekends were offered up in The Hague will be 46 in 2046.Healthy ageing cannot be handed out at retirement with a pension slip. It is built in the thirties and forties: in sleep, movement, meals cooked rather than ordered at midnight, friendships kept alive, and the unhurried Sunday the L&T chairman found so puzzling. Quality of life is not the reward at the end of a career. It is the raw material of a long one.That is why the weekend is not an indulgence. It is preventive medicine, delivered free to the exchequer. A government that sells it to foreign investors is borrowing against its own future health budget, and the loan falls due in the 2040s. By then most of today’s ministers will be drawing parliamentary pensions, attended by doctors they never had to queue for.A modest proposalIf hours worked are to be India’s calling card, let us begin where the taxpayer signs the cheque. Derek O’Brien has introduced a private member’s Bill seeking at least 100 sitting days a year and a fixed parliamentary calendar. The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution recommended 120 days for the Lok Sabha and 100 for the Rajya Sabha as far back as 2002. Neither has gone anywhere, which tells you how keen our legislators are on long hours when the hours are their own.Let the next trade delegation carry that to Europe instead: a parliament that sits, answers its questions and debates its laws. It would impress investors far more than a promise that our young will never ask for Sunday.Until then, the line from The Hague needs a footnote. Nobody in India will tell you it is five o’clock. In the Lok Sabha, on most days, there is nobody left to ask.Sunoor Verma is a former cardiothoracic surgeon and global health strategist who has worked across low-, middle- and high-income countries for over 25 years. He is Honorary President of The Himalayan Dialogues.