Public Holidays

Shashi Tharoor is at it again. This time it is decidedly for the better. He tweeted his views against Gandhi Jayanthi being a National Holiday.

In fact, there is a need to debate whether India needs or can afford so many holidays. We can safely leave aside private and unorganized sectors. In private sector, HR mangers prepare holiday list carefully to ensure that at least two of the so-called holidays fall on a Sunday. Working late hours behind closed shutters is common. There are four mandatory holidays (Republic Day, Mayday, Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanthi in a calendar year) and they have some flexibility in deciding about the festival holidays. Not many organizations declare more than 8 to 12holidays in a year, all included. In unionized sectors, management and the recognized union generally negotiate the holiday list without violating the upper limit. News paper industry has two or three holidays only in a year. Rules vary from organisation to organisation based on the Acts applicable to their sector.

If you take our nationalised Banks, for illustration, it is easier to count the working days than holidays. On the working days, actual official working hours, for public transaction purposes, are just about 4 hours/working-day. The concerned clerk/official will be engaged in different tasks of national importance during those hours meant for customers; to mention a few, discussing stock market trends, new public-issues (equity, debentures etc.), recent bank circulars and implications, pay revision, DA hike, new personal savings schemes, the purchases made on previous evening (restricted to female employees), movies just released, in-house shopping, additional coffee/tea/lunch break, cricket score etc. Consequently, they do not stay at counter for more than two hours on any working day. Another beautiful feature of banking system is out of the number of counters physically available in a branch, no more than 1/3rd operate at any time; upon inquiry, one usually gets answers like staff shortage, people are on leave, traffic jams, cricket matches going on, children's examinations, marriage season and such very valid reasons. Situations like power cut, non-availability of office boy etc. will bring transactions to a stand still. Whenever they want to yawn, they say system is down; how convenient! Latest fad is network is down. Officers and clerical staff go on strike in rotation to maximise effective holidays. All other State/Central government organizations follow remarkably similar techniques with minor changes to suit their transaction models. Mind you, we have not touched the topic of leave, whether they actually work or not with or without consideration.

How a country with a low economic growth as ours can afford so many holidays and such low working hours and productivity beats imagination. In addition, there will be several opportunities provided by Him such as strikes (sponsored by ruling parties in the govt., opposition parties and parties without representation in turns), bandhs, hartal, curphew, elections, state mourning, solar/lunar eclipses, H1N1, epidemics, rains, floods, cricket matches and so on and so forth.

Japanese people are not familiar with any type of work disruption. Long time back I read about an organization where employees had put in an extra hour a day as a mark of protest in a dispute with the management till it is amicably resolved. Yes, this method works where the society is not largely comprised of thick skinned. In some other organization, when their respected founder died, people had put in an extra hour and management erected a founder’s statue with the proceeds equivalent to employees’ extra hour’s wages and matching contribution from the management. How sensible of all of them; they have paid respects without declaring a holiday and their late founder had every reason to be happy, wherever he is.