India, Dec. 9 -- It's heartening that an opposition MP has garnered sufficient support to introduce the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, as a private member's Bill in the Lok Sabha. Supriya Sule's proposal would give employees a legal right to ignore work calls and emails beyond office hours. Private members' Bills rarely become law, but they perform a vital democratic function: They flag issues the executive is ignoring or postponing. Here, the warning is not about a soft lifestyle concern but about a hard economic and public health question - how much of India's demographic dividend are we prepared to burn out before we admit that permanent overwork is not a development strategy. Smartphones and laptops ensure that work follows employees into what should be private time. The boundary between "working hours" and "personal time" has been digitally erased, with consequences for mental and physical health. The problem is not only medical; it is structural. When employees are expected to be "always on", the cost of flexibility is shifted from the corporation's balance sheet to the worker's body and mind. As artificial intelligence makes some roles redundant and compresses others, leaner teams are told to absorb the workload of two or three people within the same clock hours. A legal right to disconnect is, therefore, not anti-productivity; it is a safeguard against a race to the bottom in which human beings are treated as endlessly extensible code. The Bill's key features make it worth serious consideration by the Union government. It grants employees a formal right to refuse work-related calls, emails and messages outside agreed hours and protects them from retaliation merely because they chose not to respond after hours. It envisages an employees' welfare authority to frame policies, mediate disputes and monitor employer practices. It also provides for penalties so that breaches are not written off as a minor cost of doing business. By recognising the psychosocial burdens of constant connectivity and requiring structured responses - policies, counselling and data - the Bill nudges employers from vague wellness talk to enforceable norms. Any discussion on overwork in India now inevitably runs into NR Narayana Murthy's prescription that young Indians should work 70 hours a week. It is one thing for an entrepreneur or founder to choose punishing hours; it is quite another to normalise those hours as an expectation from an entire generation of salaried employees. Growth built on sleep deprivation and stress-induced illnesses may show up as rising GDP, but it will also show up as higher healthcare costs and a silent mental health epidemic. Development is not a 70-hour sprint; it is a marathon. A culture that equates exhaustion with patriotism and burnout with bravery is not hard working; it is short-sighted. The timing of this Bill is instructive when seen against the new labour codes. The four consolidated codes - on wages, social security, industrial relations, and occupational safety and working conditions - have been presented as a historic overhaul. They deal with wages, social security, working hours and the position of gig and platform workers, yet they say nothing about a statutory right to disconnect in a digital economy. The codes remain anchored in an older industrial imagination of factory floors and shifts, while ignoring the extension of work into personal time through devices. It is precisely this gap that the Right to Disconnect Bill seeks to fill. Politically, the government would be unwise to dismiss this initiative simply because it comes from the opposition benches. Gen Z and younger millennials - those who entered the workforce during or after the pandemic - have a different relationship with work from their parents, and are more vocal about boundaries, mental health and the legitimacy of leisure. For a government that must increasingly court first-time and second-time voters in the urban middle class, embracing a measured right to disconnect framework would be both socially progressive and politically palatable. The fear that such a law would drive away investment is overstated. Countries that have experimented with variants of the right to disconnect have not collapsed into irrelevance. A clear, predictable regime that protects workers' downtime may actually position India as a mature, sustainable destination for high-value digital work, rather than a sweatshop for white-collar labour. The Right to Disconnect Bill should be treated not as a symbolic private member's flourish, but as a serious draft to be refined, adopted and introduced as a government Bill. Its provisions can be debated, calibrated by sector, and harmonised with existing labour codes; but the core principle - that an employee is more than a node on a corporate server - must be non-negotiable. In an age when AI threatens to devalue routine human labour even as it accelerates work cycles, protecting the right to be offline is, paradoxically, one of the most pro-human, pro-productivity steps the Indian state can take. By taking the Right to Disconnect Bill to its logical conclusion, the government has an opportunity to signal that Gen Z's time, sanity and health matter - and that in the world's largest democracy, the right to log off is as worthy of protection as the right to log in in a digital, AI-driven economy....