Written by Rehan Bhushan & Deeksha Yadav, pursuing B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) at Christ (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR.
It’s Sunday night at 9:45 PM when your manager pops up on WhatsApp. You silently guess that it is one of those drafts which isn’t urgent enough to warrant a ping and could easily wait till tomorrow. You open it anyway. Your evening is then wasted sending out the answers to your manager’s low-priority work. Now, you can spend your day at work, but your manager has you back on the clock for what they think is “off the clock” work. Most working Indians know and are accustomed to this terrible feeling. After all, we’ve just accepted this as a cost of having a corporate job. Corporate life has meant that we had to accept long hours, weekend calls, and “quick” messages. We needed to learn to deal, but not necessarily enjoy, the constant corporate intrusion. This all began to change when the Kerala Legislature Assembly finally created a bill that does something no other Indian state had the courtesy to do to finally respect the line of after work contact.
What’s in the Kerala Bill
Dr. N. Jayaraj, Kerala Legislative Assembly Chief Whip, Kanjirappally MLA, introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, as a Private Member’s Bill. Basically, it means after official work hours, there are no consequences for ignoring work-related calls, emails, or messages.
What matters is the Bill preventing employers from demoting staff, eliminating benefits, or removing staff from training opportunities as a crude way to punish employees who do not work after hours. Employees motivated to punish staff who do not work after hours will have to draft a charter giving them a right.
There is also a dedicated channel for grievances. This channel is the district-level Grievance Redressal Committee of the Regional Joint Labour Commissioner. This gives a formal means for grievances to be resolved. The Bill provides staff the right to disconnect from work after official work hours, which is not enforceable, and therefore is not a right.
Delhi Is Watching Too
Kerala’s not the only state focused on this. Here’s something you might already know there was a national policy with the same main framework. Compare the two drafts. Kerala’s was the better one. The policy from the center is kind of ambiguous in terms of what is classified as a “punishment” for the disconnection. It gets better! It also has a contradiction. Under the center’s policy, an employee gets paid regular wages for the Over Time, while every labor code states that Over Time must be paid double the regular wage. It’s not a typo, and this is one of the many cases that go to court.
Late to the Game, but Not Alone
France pioneered this move in 2017, mandating negotiations on after-work hours for firms employing more than 50 people. Belgium made it illegal for managers to contact civil servants out of working hours unless it was an emergency. Portugal has an absolute ban on contacting workers outside office hours and even penalizes it through heavy fines. Spain used the data protection angle, considering it a breach of privacy to keep tracking one’s staff during after-hours. Australia directly put it down in the Fair Work Act, along with an actual tribunal which can impose stop orders.
Same concept, different words everywhere: being reachable always is an extra form of labor, which was not accounted for by any labor laws before the phone became omnipresent.
Why Now?
No accident, this is. India’s corporate world is among those with the highest incidence of burnout, while the hybrid work model exacerbated the problem rather than solved it by tearing down the dividing line between work and home. Add to this the number of Indians who work in US or Europe time zones and you have individuals whose sleeping patterns operate according to a calendar that’s thousands of miles away.
Nor is it equally distributed. As work cuts into personal time, it tends to fall predominantly on women’s shoulders, the phone on one hand and a meal, a child or elderly parents in the other. Female labor force participation is seen by economists examining female labor participation in India as facing such interruptions that are indeed a genuine structural barrier to work, particularly in the context of home office settings where paid work and care work become almost indistinguishable from each other. A right to disconnect cannot solve the problem alone. It would be foolish to think that anything trivial could solve the problem. Yet, it is the first time when Indian labor law recognizes even to some extent that being reachable always has a price attached to it. Hours worked have always been regulated under various acts, including the Factories Act, the Shops and Establishments Acts and even the recently passed labor codes. No act has ever touched upon phone calls made at midnight. Some commentators have even linked this to Article 21 – right to life and personal liberty.
The Law Isn’t Perfect, But That’s Okay
There’s something for small businesses to complain about here. No one should mistake the needs of a ten-person business for those of a large organization. The bill is attempting to be accommodated in this regard by letting firms of less than ten employees craft their own charter but critics argue that it is not enough crafted to really work in the field.
On the procedural side of things, there’s more room for improvement here as well. Timelines, appeal rights, the process for filing complaints – mostly left to be figured out through regulation at some point in the future. And finally, there is the more difficult question beneath it all whether legislation can really do anything to affect workplace culture. India has had labor laws around working hours for years, but they have failed to affect workplace culture which values being constantly available for decades. With no enforcement, this new law may end up being another well-meaning one that no one dares to implement.
Its Implications for You Today
To be clear, nothing is going to change at your desk tomorrow. The bill hasn’t been passed yet. Even if it passes, regulations and deadlines and amendments will have to happen before it affects your work environment in any way. So, no – you shouldn’t try to put this article into your conversation with your employer tonight.
What to watch out for is what will happen next. If this succeeds in Kerala, other states are likely to feel compelled to act, in much the same way that some states started to notify their own rules of labor code after a couple of pioneering states took initiative. Those who are working in the Human Resource departments of companies which have an office in Kerala are those who are going to be affected first, and the wise ones would not wait for the bill to pass before deciding on after-hours policies. Law students should pay attention to this one – it is the place where labor law, fundamental constitutional rights and a very personal issue intersect.
The Bottom Line
It is not clear whether this piece of legislation will stand as it is, get watered down, or die a quiet death, as many PMB in India are wont to do. They rarely pass. But that is not the point of the exercise. What makes this piece of legislation interesting is the fact that it represents the first instance where an Indian legislative body tried to put together a definition of personal time in a world were having a mobile phone on your person means being available 24/7.
That message sent by your boss on a Sunday night remains perfectly legal. It will not be illegal everywhere once this law comes into effect, provided that this law comes into effect at all. But for the first time in Indian parliamentary history, that point was made quite clearly in public forum.
Caveat: The views, analyses, and information presented in this article are provided in good faith and for general informational purposes only. No representation or warranty, express or implied, is made regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, or completeness of the information. Readers should conduct their own research and seek professional guidance where appropriate. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be held responsible for any loss, liability, or consequence arising from reliance on this content.
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