INTRODUCTION
There was a time when leaving the office actually meant leaving work behind. That line has mostly disappeared. A laptop and a phone are enough to keep a job following someone home, into the weekend, and onto a holiday, and the expectation to reply even at 11 pm, even on a Sunday, has quietly become normal in large parts of India’s workforce, especially in IT, finance, media, and consulting. The ‘right to disconnect’ is the proposed answer to this: a legal entitlement to ignore work calls, emails, and messages outside working hours without facing any professional consequence for doing so.
Several countries have already turned this into law. India has not, though a private member’s bill has tried more than once. The real question this raises is not just whether India should legislate a right to disconnect, but whether it deserves the weight of a fundamental right, given how closely it connects to the right to health, dignity, and leisure already read into Article 21 of the Constitution.
WHY THIS HAS BECOME URGENT?
Constant availability has a cost, and it is not an abstract one. Studies on ‘availability creep ’-the gradual expansion of work into what used to be personal time link it to burnout, disrupted sleep, higher anxiety, and strained family life. India’s own work culture makes this sharper: long hours are often treated as a proxy for commitment, and refusing an after-hours message can look like a lack of dedication rather than a reasonable boundary. Remote and hybrid work, adopted widely since the pandemic, has made this worse in a specific way: when home is also the office, there is no physical cue left to signal that the workday is over.
None of this means digital connectivity is bad. It has made flexible work possible for millions of people who could not otherwise participate in the workforce. The problem is not the technology; it is the absence of any boundary around it.
INDIA’S CURRENT LEGAL POSITION
India has no statute that grants a right to disconnect. What exists instead is an indirect, constitutional route. Article 21 guarantees the right to life,[1] and the Supreme Court has repeatedly read this to include more than mere survival. In Consumer Education and Research Centre v Union of India, the Court held that a worker’s right to health, medical care, and humane working conditions is part of the right to life itself.[2] Bandhua Mukti Morcha v Union of India went further, holding that the right to live with human dignity draws directly from the Directive Principles of State Policy, including the provisions on humane conditions of work and leisure.[3] Article 42 itself directs the State to secure just and humane conditions of work,[4] which is difficult to reconcile with an employee being expected to answer work calls at midnight as standard practice.
Even the newer labour codes fall short here. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 regulates working hours, overtime, and rest intervals in some detail,[5] but it was written for a factory-floor model of work: physical premises, fixed shifts, a clock to punch. It has nothing to say about a WhatsApp message sent to an employee at 9 pm. The digital spillover of work into personal time simply falls outside what the Code was designed to regulate.
THE LEGISLATIVE ATTEMPT THAT HASN’T PASSED
Parliament has actually seen an attempt at this. NCP MP Supriya Sule introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill as a private member’s bill, first in 2018 and again in later terms,[6] proposing an Employees’ Welfare Authority, mandatory negotiated charters between employers and staff on after-hours contact, overtime pay where such contact is agreed to, and penalties for non-compliance. It is a reasonably thoughtful piece of drafting. It has also never been debated. Private member’s bills in India are discussed only a small fraction of the time, and this one has lapsed and been reintroduced without ever reaching a vote. That says less about the merits of the idea and more about how little institutional weight private members’ bills carry in Indian Parliamentary practice.
HOW OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE HANDLED IT?
France was first. Article L2242-17 of the Labour Code, introduced by the 2016 ‘El Khomri law’, requires companies with fifty or more employees to negotiate the terms of digital disconnection annually, and to draw up a charter if no agreement is reached.[7] It does not ban after-hours emails outright; it forces the question onto the negotiating table instead, and French courts have since awarded damages to employees required to stay constantly reachable outside their contracted hours.
Australia took a more direct route. Since August 2024, the Fair Work Act allows employees to refuse to monitor or respond to work contact outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable, with disputes going to the Fair Work Commission if they cannot be resolved at the workplace level.[8] It is a right that is enforceable, not merely aspirational, which is precisely the piece missing from India’s own attempt so far.
SHOULD IT BE A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT?
There is a real difference between a statutory right and a fundamental one, and it matters here. A statutory right, closer to what France and Australia have, depends on Parliament continuing to want it and can be diluted or repealed by a simple majority. Constitutional recognition would also ensure greater judicial scrutiny of workplace practices that disproportionately interfere with employees’ physical and mental well-being. By treating digital disconnection as an aspect of dignity and personal liberty, courts would be better equipped to assess whether employer expectations remain proportionate and consistent with the constitutional commitment to humane working conditions. A right rooted in Article 21, by contrast, would carry constitutional weight and be far harder to erode, precisely because Indian courts have already shown a willingness to read health, dignity, and leisure into that Article for workers in hazardous industries.
The stronger case is not for inventing an entirely new fundamental right, but for recognising that the right to disconnect is already implicit in the right to life as the Supreme Court has interpreted it; dignity and leisure do not stop mattering just because the harm comes from a phone rather than asbestos dust. Codifying it through ordinary legislation, similar to the Sule bill but backed by clear enforcement mechanisms akin to Australia’s, would still be the more realistic first step. Judicial recognition could follow, the way it has for so many other rights that started as directive principles and grew into enforceable guarantees.
CONCLUSION
India’s labour codes were not built with a hyper-connected workforce in mind, and the result is a real gap one that Article 21 gestures toward closing but does not, on its own, actually close. A private member’s bill has tried to fill that gap since 2018 and has gone nowhere, while France and Australia have shown that both negotiated and directly enforceable models can work. The right to disconnect does not need to be invented from nothing in India; it needs Parliament to give shape and enforcement to a principle the courts have already recognised in substance. Until that happens, the boundary between a workday and a life outside it will keep depending on how demanding any particular employer chooses to be, rather than on any right an employee can actually rely on.
Author(s) Name: Niharika Aggarwal (Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Management and Studies (MAIMS), Delhi)
References:
[1] Constitution of India 1950, art 21
[2] Consumer Education and Research Centre and Ors v Union of India and Ors (1995) 3 SCC 42
[3] Bandhua Mukti Morcha v Union of India and Ors (1984) 3 SCC 161
[4] Constitution of India 1950, art 42
[5] Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020
[6] The Right to Disconnect Bill 2018
[7] Code du travail (French Labour Code), art L2242-17
[8] Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No 2) Act 2024 (Cth) pt VIII