The Legal Viability of "Right to Disconnect" Law in India: Need, Implications, and Way Forward
Introduction : In December 2024, an HR email from the home-salon startup Yes Madam went viral for telling over a hundred employees that the company was "parting ways" with everyone who had admitted, in an internal survey, to feeling significant work stress. YesMadam later said the termination was staged as part of an awareness stunt for a proposed "De-Stress Leave" policy, and that no one was actually let go. Whether or not it was a stunt, the backlash it drew was real, and it landed barely three months after the country had been confronted with an actual tragedy: the death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, a 26-year-old chartered accountant at EY's Pune office, four months into her first job, after her mother wrote an open letter blaming excessive workload and a culture that would not let her switch off.
The digital enablement of the workplace has authorised uninterrupted connectivity and productivity, but it has also entrenched an "always-on" culture that intrudes on an employee's private time and mental health. This paper argues that a "Right to Disconnect" law in India is not only necessary but is also constitutionally and legally sound, and it examines what such a law would need to look like against the backdrop of existing labour legislation, employment contracts, and the two legislative attempts, one at the Union level and one in Kerala, that are already before Indian lawmakers.
The Case for a "Right to Disconnect" Law
Mental Health and Well-Being. Work-related stress is one of the major contributors to India's mental health burden. As per the study of the Global Burden of Disease Study , done by the India’s State-Level Disease Burden Initiative which is also published in The Lancet Psychiatry, India claims that India’s mental health burden is close to 15% of the world's mental health burden, and also the share of India's total disease burden resulting to mental disorders almost doubled between 1990 and 2017. Continual social media connectivity adds on to these feelings of burnout, anxiety, and depression in a workforce which is already under-resourced to treat them medically , India's mental health treatment gap remains as one of the widest in the whole world. Anna Sebastian Perayil case put a name and identity to what these data otherwise leave abstract, and it is not the only one: the same period saw a young management consultant's death which is being linked to work pressure, and a national conversation opens up about the true cost of an "always-on" work culture.
International Precedents. Many jurisdictions have already legislated on this specific question. France being the first, through the”El Khomri” Labour law of 2016 , now codified as Article L2242-17 of the Code du travail, which asks companies with fifty and more employees to negotiate the terms and conditions of the right to disconnect every year, failing to which the employer must voluntarily draw up a charter; and non-compliance can draw a penalty of up to 1% of the employees' total salary. Portugal followed up with Law NO. 83/2021, which is in force since January 2022, which asserts a duty on employers to hold back from contacting employees during rest periods except for cases of force majeure, backing it up by fines and, in serious cases, treatment as a form of workplace harassment. Belgium, Spain, as well as Italy have adopted comparative measures, and the European Parliament has separately called upon the European Commission to propose a directive making the right to disconnect an EU-wide entitlement for digital workers. These examples give India a template, and they also show two different regulatory choices: France and its collective-bargaining model that leaves the details to negotiation, and Portugal's more direct statutory prohibition, backed by fines, on contact outside rest periods.
Legal and Economic Imperatives. A right to disconnect law would also sit comfortably within Article 21 of the Constitution of India, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. In the case of Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Read.) v. Union of India, a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India held that the right to privacy, which also includes decisional and informational autonomy over a person’s personal life, is intrinsic to Article 21 and to the freedoms guaranteed to citizens under Part III of the Constitution of India. An employee's ability to control its own private time, free of employer interference, is a natural extension of that same autonomy. Apart from the constitutional argument, there is also a business case in this issue: firms that usually respect boundaries around after-hours communication tend to report lower attrition as well as higher employee satisfaction, which suggests that the right to disconnect need not to be framed only as a cost employers must absorb but also as an investment which can pay for itself in retention and productivity.
Implications Under Existing Legal Frameworks
Labour Laws. India's current labour statutes were not written with digital connectivity in mind. The Factories Act 1948, in Sections 51 to 56, says that a worker's hours at 48 a week and 9 a day and makes rest intervals compulsory, but this statue regulates only the time an employee physically spends at work, not the after-hours emails and calls that now usually extend the working day invisibly. The Shops and Establishments Acts, which are the state legislations and which is why they vary across India, similarly regulate opening hours, weekly holidays, and overtime pay without addressing electronic communication after those hours end. A right to disconnect law needs to amend or supplement these statutes to define what counts as "work," or whether an unanswered after-hours message can ever be treated as a disciplinary lapse, and how the overtime provisions apply to time spent responding to digital communication from home.
Employer-Employee Contracts. Standard-form employment agreements in India rarely contain any specific clause about after-hours communication, leaving the question to informal workplace customs, which usually favours the employer by default. A right to disconnect laws would need a model clause that employers are ordered to negotiate with employees and their representatives, similar to the French and Kerala approaches, so that an employee who does not reply to a message sent outside of working hours cannot be penalised, demoted, or marked down in their performance reviews for that reason.
Constitutional Rights. As we discussed above, the right to disconnect can be read as one part of the personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 to the citizens of India, following the reasoning and judgement in Puttaswamy. It protects an employee’s control over their own time and, by addition, their need to maintain family relationships, rest, and personal pursuits, without being encroached upon by a professional obligation which was never formally agreed to extend beyond the working day.
India's Own Legislative Attempts
India has already made two attempts at legalising this right, and it is worth tracking both closely. The case of NCP MP Supriya Sule first introduced a private member's Right to Disconnect Bill in Lok Sabha in 2018, talking about establishing an Employees' Welfare Authority empowered on enforcing the rights of employees to disengage from calls and emails after their work hours and on holidays, with a fine of up to 1% of a company's total remuneration for non-compliance of this rule. Like the majority of private member's bills, it lapsed without any discussion. Sule reintroduced it in 2019, and again this time as the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025, tabled in the Lok Sabha on 5 December 2025, this time also proposing a mandatory counselling and digital-detox measures for affected employees of the company. Separately, and more importantly, Kerala decided to take the first state-level step in India on this particular question: the Kerala Right to Disconnect Bill,2025 , introduced as a private member's bill by MLA Dr N. Jayaraj in the year October 2025, would grant private-sector employees a legal right to refuse after-hours communication, and bar employers from taking a disciplinary action against employees who exercise it, and to set up district-level Private Sector Workplace Grievance Redressal Committees, chaired by the Regional Joint Labour Commissioner, to look over compliance and investigate complaints. Notably, Kerala's bill followed closely on the first anniversary of Anna Sebastian Perayil's death, and its drafters have been explicit that her case was part of what prompted it. If passed, Kerala would become the first Indian state to codify this right in law, and given that labour is a subject on the Concurrent List, its passage could well accelerate the pending national bill.
Challenges in Implementation
Cultural and Structural Barriers. Indian workplace culture has been historically rewarded by visible overwork, and also managers and employees alike often judge constant availability with commitment. Changing this will require more than a legal statute; it calls for constant awareness-building among both employers and employees so that disconnecting from outside work hours is not read as a lack of dedication among employers.
Sectoral Differences. Business sectors such as healthcare, information technology, and client-facing services that operate across different time zones cannot adopt a blanket after-hours communication ban without disrupting essential or time-critical functions. The Kerala and 2025 Union bills both anticipate this only partially in their bills, and any workable Indian law will need sector-specific rules carve-outs, along the lines already being discussed for healthcare, emergency services, and IT-enabled services, rather than a single uniform rule applied across every industry.
Enforcement Mechanisms. A right that exists on paper without a complaint mechanism behind it is not likely to change workplace behaviour among employers and employees. Kerala's proposed district-level grievance redressal committees, empowered us to inspect premises and investigate complaints raised, and offer one workable model; the 2025 Union bill's Employees' Welfare Authority is less detailed on enforcement procedures, and critics have already flagged that gap. Any national law will need to specify not just the penalty for non-compliance but the process by which an employee actually gets a violation investigated and remedied.
Recommendations
Policy Design. The law should require every company above a defined employee threshold to negotiate and publish a clear, written policy on after-hours electronic communication in consultation with its employees, rather than leaving the content of the right undefined, which has been a recurring criticism of both the 2018 and 2025 Union bills.
Awareness Campaigns. Government bodies, industry associations, and individual employers should jointly run awareness efforts on the value of work-life boundaries, since cultural resistance, more than legal ambiguity, is likely to be the main obstacle to compliance.
Pilot Programs. Before any national rollout, piloting the right to disconnect in a small set of industries, and studying Kerala's implementation once its bill is enacted, would generate practical evidence on what enforcement mechanisms actually work, which sectors need carve-outs, and how smaller employers can comply without disproportionate cost.
Conclusion
The Yes Madam controversy and the death of Anna Sebastian Perayil have, within the space of a few months of each other, forced an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about India's "always-on" work culture. A Right to Disconnect law is not a novel foreign import to be resisted on grounds of impracticality; India has already tried, twice, to legislate it at the Union level, and Kerala is now attempting to do so at the state level. What is missing is not the legal or constitutional foundation, which Article 21 and the Puttaswamy line of cases already supply, but political will and a workable enforcement design. By drawing on the French and Portuguese models abroad and on Kerala's own draft at home, India can move from private member's bills that lapse without debate to a law that actually protects employees' mental well-being, personal liberty, and, ultimately, their right to a life outside work.
Author: Suhaliya Qureshi in case of any queries please contact/write back to us via email to content@khuranaandkhurana.com or at Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorney.
References
Startup YesMadam Went Viral for 'Firing Stressed Employees,' Claims It Was Just a Stunt Gone Wrong, Fortune (Dec. 10, 2024).
'Anna's Death Should Serve as Wake-Up Call for EY': Mother's Letter Sparks Debate on Work Stress, The Week (Sept. 18, 2024).
India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative, The Burden of Mental Disorders Across the States of India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 1990-2017, 7 Lancet Psychiatry 148 (2020).
Nicolas Boring, France: Right to Disconnect Takes Effect, Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor (Jan. 13, 2017).
The Right to Disconnect - Or as Portugal Calls It, the Duty of Absence of Contact, Kluwer Global Workplace Law & Policy Blog (2021), discussing Law No. 83/2021 (Port.).
European Parliament Press Release, Right to Disconnect Should Be an EU-Wide Fundamental Right, MEPs Say (Jan. 21, 2021).
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1 (India).
The Factories Act, 1948, No. 63 of 1948, ss. 51-56 (India).
Pvt Member's Bill Proposes Employees' Right to Disconnect Work Calls or Emails After Office Hours, LiveLaw (Jan. 9, 2019).
Explained: India's Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 and What It Means for Employees, Lexology (Dec. 16, 2025).
Kerala Introduces Right to Disconnect Bill for Employees, India Law Offices (Oct. 10, 2025).
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