Workers in the infrastructure sector should work three shifts a day so that the country can catch up with the pace of development of higher income countries, N R Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys said on Wednesday.
“People in the infrastructure industry must work three shifts. They should not just do one shift. Elsewhere, in the nation of our aspiration, I have definitely seen people working two shifts,” he said, in a conversation with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath at the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2023.
The comments come a month after Murthy, in a conversation with 3one4 Capital’s Mohandas Pai, said that youngsters should work 12 hour a day to ensure India can compete with economies that have made tremendous progress in the last 25-30 years.
On Wednesday, Murthy also emphasised the need for the legislators to study China “very carefully”, as it deals with the same problems but has managed to reach a GDP that is 5-6x of India’s.
“I would humbly request our politicians to study China very very carefully and then see what are the good things that we can learn from China and implement it here so that India too advances at the same rate as China,’ he said.
Talking about India’s per capita GDP, Murthy noted that India’s $2,300 is still far away from the per capita GDP of middle-income countries. Murthy also batted for introduction of more high-quality English-medium schools across Karnataka, to ensure that the state’s workforce can work for global companies.
When asked about India’s taxation policies, Murthy said that higher tax are important to sustain the government’s welfare policies.
“In a country like India where there is a lot of poor people. I think we the evangelists of capitalism must accept that we have to pay a higher level of taxation because there are so many public services that our government has to provide to poor people,” he said.
Murthy added that to drive the society’s progress, citizens need to contribute in return of welfare schemes. He gave an hypothetical example of citizens increasing attendance percentage in schools by 20% in return of free of cost electricity.
“While I’m not against free services, I think we should expect something in return from the receivers so that they take a slightly bigger responsibility to make their own future generation better,” he said.