Published on: 26th June 2026
Authored by: Swapnil Raj
Chanakya National Law University
Introduction
The rapid spread of smartphones, email, and instant-messaging platforms has produced a state of hyper-connectivity in which employees remain reachable by employers well beyond formal working hours. According to International Labour Organization data, the average working week in India is 46.7 hours, and more than 51 per cent of workers work more than 49 hours a week — well above the global average.[1]
The death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, a 26-year-old chartered accountant at Ernst & Young in Pune, brought national attention to the dangers of overwork. She died four months after joining the firm, and her mother attributed her death to extreme work pressure. This tragedy, combined with the blurring of work-life boundaries during remote work in the COVID-19 pandemic, intensified public demand for government intervention to limit employers’ ability to demand constant availability from employees.
Member of Parliament Supriya Sule introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill in 2018, which proposed that employees be entitled to refuse to respond to work-related communications outside working hours.[2] Congress MP Shashi Tharoor separately proposed amendments to the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code 2020 along similar lines, and the Kerala state government introduced its own Right to Disconnect Bill in 2025.[3]
However, the four labour codes introduced in India in 2019 and 2020 contain no provision recognising a right to disconnect. This article examines whether this silence amounts to a constitutional failure, and considers comparative models from other jurisdictions.
Understanding the Right to Disconnect
Definition and Nature: The right to disconnect is a legally or contractually recognised entitlement of workers not to be required to access, respond to, or monitor work-related digital communications outside agreed working hours, without adverse consequences for their employment. It seeks, in essence, to make non-working time a protected space and to establish meaningful temporal limits around work.
The right has both a negative and a positive dimension. Negatively, it shields employees from explicit requests, as well as from the implicit expectation of availability, that extend managerial authority into personal time. Positively, it requires organisational and technical arrangements — such as deferred-delivery systems or clear policies — to be put in place so that disconnection is possible in practice, not merely in principle. This dual character reflects a broader shift: from regulating working hours alone to regulating the digital presence and reach of work itself.
Conceptual Foundations: Three principles underpin the right. First, labour dignity: work should be organised in a manner compatible with rest, family life, and personal development, in line with the ILO’s ‘decent work’ framework. Second, individual autonomy: the constant availability enabled by digital technology erodes employee autonomy by blurring the boundary between professional and personal identity. Third, digital privacy: after-hours work communications routinely penetrate personal devices and personal spaces, allowing employers to intrude into domains that should remain private. Empirical research supports each of these concerns: studies have repeatedly shown that constant connectivity through information and communication technologies (ICTs) is associated with increased stress, work–family conflict, and burnout.[4] Much of this difficulty stems from what researchers term ‘telepressure’ — the psychological compulsion to respond to work-related messages immediately, without waiting for explicit instruction to do so.[5]
The Constitutional Basis Under Article 21
Article 21, Right to Life with Dignity: Article 21 guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.[6] Over time, the judiciary has developed this provision into a repository of substantive rights, including dignity, autonomy, privacy, and wellbeing. In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India,[7] the Supreme Court held that the right to life includes the right to live with dignity, and that any action infringing personal liberty must be fair, just, and reasonable. In Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh,[8] the Court recognised that personal liberty extends to a protected sphere of privacy. Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi and Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India[9] further held that humane working conditions, health, and dignity are integral to the right to life.
Rest, Mental Health, and Psychological Integrity: The constitutional protection of rest is directly relevant to the right to disconnect. In In re Ramlila Maidan Incident,[10] the Supreme Court held that the right to sleep at night without disturbance is a fundamental aspect of life under Article 21, placed on par with the rights to breathe and eat. In People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India,[11] the Court held that exploitative labour conditions violate the right to live with human dignity, constitutionalising the requirement of fair and humane working conditions.
A landmark 2025 development is Sukdeb Saha v. State of Andhra Pradesh,[12] in which the Supreme Court held that mental health is an integral dimension of the right to life and dignity under Article 21, issuing binding directions to protect psychological wellbeing. This holding is especially significant for individuals whose work involves continuous engagement with electronic devices, since constant connectivity has been linked to fatigue, anxiety, and disrupted sleep. The Court further held that a proper regulatory framework was required to give meaningful effect to a worker’s right to disconnect.
Privacy and Decisional Autonomy: In K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India,[13] a nine-judge bench unanimously held that the right to privacy is protected under Article 21. This recognises that individuals retain control over their personal information, their decisional autonomy, and the integrity of their private space, free from unwarranted intrusion.
Digital connectivity complicates this protection in a specific way: work communications now travel directly into employees’ homes and personal devices, allowing employers a continuous channel of access even outside working hours. The Puttaswamy framework speaks directly to this problem. Read in light of its reasoning, the right to privacy implies a right to disconnect from work-related demands during non-working time — allowing employees to reclaim both physical space and uninterrupted time that digital intrusion would otherwise erode.
From Constitutional Principle to Legislative Duty: Taken together, these cases demonstrate that Article 21 protects a cluster of interests of which the right to disconnect forms a part. The State’s failure to translate these interests into labour-law protections against digital overreach is not merely a policy gap, but a positive constitutional failure. Article 39 protects the health and strength of workers; Article 42 mandates just and humane conditions of work; Article 43 directs the State to secure conditions enabling the full enjoyment of leisure.[14] A statutory right to disconnect would not create a new substantive right; it would operationalise rights already inherent in Article 21 — in the same way that the Protection of Women from Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act, 2013 and the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 have previously translated constitutional guarantees into enforceable legal standards.[15]
The Legislative Gap: India’s Labour Codes and Digital Overwork
The Code on Wages 2019, the Industrial Relations Code 2020, the Code on Social Security 2020, and the OSH Code 2020[16] represent the most comprehensive labour law reform since Independence. Of these, the OSH Code 2020 is most directly relevant: it prescribes an eight-hour working day and a 48-hour working week as standard, alongside overtime at double wages and mandated rest intervals.[17] Yet these provisions are built around a model of work defined by physical presence and measurable attendance at a workplace.
Crucially, none of the four Codes addresses communication after working hours, or the broader phenomenon of digital availability outside formal shifts. Indian labour law regulates working hours, shift patterns, and overtime, but has no concept of ‘connection time’ — the time during which an employee remains digitally reachable by an employer, regardless of whether they are formally on duty.
The consequences of this gap are significant. Employees who respond to after-hours emails or attend calls during leave are not legally treated as working for purposes of overtime, rest, or occupational health protections. Employer-led measures, such as voluntary email curfews, remain entirely discretionary, with no statutory minimum and no enforceable right of refusal. This sits in direct tension with the Article 21 jurisprudence discussed above: although the Supreme Court has recognised dignity, mental health, and privacy as fundamental interests, none of this recognition has yet been translated into labour-law norms governing digital disconnection.
Comparative Analysis: France and Germany
France — The Statutory Negotiation Model: France became the first jurisdiction to codify the right to disconnect, through the Loi Travail (El Khomri Law) of 2016,[18] which entered into force on 1 January 2017. Amendments to the French Labour Code[19] made the “modalities of the full exercise by the employee of the right to disconnect,” and the regulation of digital tools, mandatory subjects of annual workplace negotiation on professional equality and quality of work. Enterprises with fifty or more employees must include the right within these negotiations; where no agreement is reached, employers must unilaterally adopt a charter defining how the right is to be exercised. Enforcement has real teeth: in July 2018, the French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation) upheld an award against Rentokil Initial for requiring an employee to remain reachable at all times.[20] The principal weakness of the French model is its lack of a single, precise statutory definition of what the right requires in practice — leaving individual enterprises considerable latitude in how they implement it, which can produce inconsistent protection across industries.
Germany — The Co-Determination Model: Germany has not enacted a standalone statutory right to disconnect, relying instead on existing working-time law combined with works-council co-determination. The Arbeitszeitgesetz (Working Hours Act) requires an eleven-hour rest period between working days.[21] Where an after-hours message interrupts this rest period, the employer may, in principle, face liability for violating statutory rest requirements. In practice, implementation has largely occurred through individual company policy: Volkswagen, for example, does not forward emails to certain categories of employees outside working hours, while Daimler operates a system called ‘Mail on Holiday,’ which automatically deletes emails sent to employees while they are on leave.
The principal limitation of the German model is that it depends heavily on the presence of a works council and a unionised workforce to be effective. It functions well in large, heavily unionised enterprises, but offers correspondingly weaker protection to employees of small companies or in workplaces with low union density, who receive far fewer of these protections than their counterparts in larger, more organised firms.
Lessons for India: This comparison points to four design principles. First, protecting workers requires binding rules, not merely voluntary employer commitments: clear statutory standards, defining what is and is not permitted, are necessary, along with credible enforcement and protection against retaliation for employees who exercise the right. Second, the French negotiation-based model shows how flexibility across industries can be preserved while still guaranteeing baseline protection for all workers. Third, the German experience shows the risk of relying too heavily on collective bargaining structures: in a labour market like India’s, where a substantial share of the workforce is informally employed and not unionised, a model built primarily around works councils risks leaving the most vulnerable workers unprotected. Fourth, any Indian framework should therefore combine a clear, enforceable statutory baseline with sector-specific negotiation, rather than choosing one model to the exclusion of the other.
Recommendations
1. The government should enact a standalone Right to Disconnect Act, grounded in Article 21, establishing that employees are not obliged to monitor, access, or respond to work-related digital communications outside agreed working hours without facing adverse consequences. The OSH Code 2020 and the Code on Wages 2019 should be amended so that any work performed outside designated hours via digital devices is treated as working time for the purposes of overtime pay and rest-period calculations.
2. The law should expressly prohibit retaliation against employees who exercise the right to disconnect. The burden should rest on the employer to demonstrate that any adverse action — including termination, demotion, or an adverse performance review — was not connected to the employee’s exercise of this right, with statutory penalties for non-compliance.
3. Establishments above a defined size threshold (for instance, fifty or more employees) should be statutorily required to develop a right-to-disconnect policy, in consultation with employees or their representative unions. Such policies should specify designated non-working hours (such as nights and weekends) and the compensation arrangements that apply where work outside these hours is unavoidable.
4. Implementation should proceed in a phased manner, beginning with sectors where digital overwork is most acute, such as IT-BPM and financial services. The government should establish a monitoring mechanism to track the law’s effectiveness, collecting data on digital work patterns and their effects on employee mental health, and reporting periodically to Parliament.
Conclusion
The digitalisation of work has created a situation in which the temporal and spatial boundaries of employment are increasingly extended by technology, to the point of becoming effectively limitless. While India’s Labour Codes represent a genuine modernising ambition, they remain built around an industrial-era paradigm of regulation that does not speak to the digital extension of work. This silence in the law is not merely a legislative gap but a constitutional deficiency — one that leaves millions of Indian workers exposed to risks to the dignity, mental health, privacy, and autonomy that the Supreme Court has firmly grounded in Article 21.
The right to disconnect is not merely a desirable policy outcome; it is a right with a constitutional foundation, properly understood as an extension of Article 21 into the domain of digitally mediated work. Comparative experience shows that this right can be made real in different kinds of workplaces, while also illustrating the risks of relying solely on voluntary employer goodwill, and the protection gaps that emerge where large segments of the workforce remain outside organised labour structures.
India now needs a framework that is both constitutionally grounded and genuinely inclusive — one capable of extending the right to disconnect to all categories of workers, including those in informal and self-employment, not only those in conventional salaried roles. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the right to life under Article 21 is a right to live with dignity, not mere physical survival. In an era in which work increasingly travels through digital channels into every corner of a worker’s life, giving that guarantee practical effect requires a clear legal framework governing how, and when, work may reach a person through technology. The right to disconnect deserves recognition not because it is a passing demand of the digital age, but because it operationalises a guarantee the Constitution already makes.
References
[1] International Labour Organization, Working Time and Work–Life Balance Around the World (ILO 2022) 11–15.
[2] The Right to Disconnect Bill 2018, Bill No 211 of 2018 (Lok Sabha, India).
[3] Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (No 37 of 2020, India Code); Kerala Right to Disconnect Bill, Bill No 257 of 2025 (Kerala Legislative Assembly, India).
[4] Tayyba Rasool, Nosheen Fatima Warraich and Muhammad Sajid, ‘Examining the Impact of Technology Overload at the Workplace: A Systematic Review’ (2022) 12 SAGE Open 1.
[5] Emily Wilder, Shahnaz Aziz and Karl L Wuensch, ‘Working 9 to Always: Relationships Among Workplace Telepressure, ICT Boundary Creation, and Workaholism’ (2023) 12 Health Psychology Reports 227.
[6] Constitution of India, art 21.
[7] Maneka Gandhi v Union of India (1978) 1 SCC 248 (India).
[8] Kharak Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh AIR 1963 SC 1295 (India).
[9] Francis Coralie Mullin v Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi (1981) 1 SCC 608 (India); Bandhua Mukti Morcha v Union of India (1984) 3 SCC 161 (India).
[10] In re Ramlila Maidan Incident Dt 4/5.06.2011 (2012) 5 SCC 1 (India).
[11] People’s Union for Democratic Rights v Union of India (1982) 2 SCC 494 (India).
[12] Sukdeb Saha v State of Andhra Pradesh 2025 INSC 893 (India).
[13] K S Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1 (India).
[14] Constitution of India, arts 39, 42, 43.
[15] Protection of Women from Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act 2013 (No 14 of 2013, India Code); Mental Healthcare Act 2017 (No 10 of 2017, India Code).
[16] Code on Wages 2019 (No 29 of 2019, India Code); Industrial Relations Code 2020 (No 35 of 2020, India Code); Code on Social Security 2020 (No 36 of 2020, India Code); Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (No 37 of 2020, India Code).
[17] Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (No 37 of 2020, India Code) ss 25–28.
[18] Loi n° 2016-1088 du 8 août 2016 relative au travail, à la modernisation du dialogue social et à la sécurisation des parcours professionnels, J.O., 9 août 2016 (France).
[19] Code du travail, art L 2242-17, 7° (France).
[20] Cour de cassation [Cass], soc, 12 juillet 2018, n° 17-13.029 (Rentokil Initial) (France).
[21] Arbeitszeitgesetz [ArbZG] [Working Hours Act] ss 3–5 (Germany).
