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The human toll<\/p>\n
In Indian metros, it\u2019s not uncommon for young professionals to work 10\u201312 hour days, respond to messages late into the night, and spend weekends catching up on \u201curgent deliverables.\u201d Anxiety, insomnia, and disconnection are not rare symptoms, they\u2019re the emotional tax of simply showing up to work. According to a 2022 Deloitte report<\/a>, 80% of Indian professionals reported mental health issues during the year, with millennials and Gen Z workers most affected.<\/p>\n And for some, the pressure becomes unbearable. In 2023, a young employee at Ernst & Young died by suicide, citing work-related stress. Similar incidents have occurred across industries, from finance to tech to advertising. These stories often disappear under institutional silence, but they represent a very real cost of our current model of success.<\/p>\n The hustle doesn\u2019t just play out in glass-walled offices, it\u2019s even more pervasive in the informal sector, where regulation is almost non-existent and survival itself demands overwork. Street vendors, delivery personnel, construction workers, and gig workers navigate unstable hours, unsafe working conditions, and daily uncertainty, without the safety net of contracts, healthcare, or fair wages. The mass migration to urban centres is driven by hope but sustained by a system that thrives on invisibilised labour. Here, hustle is a lived reality with no exit. The mental health toll is enormous, but rarely understood.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to acknowledge that not everyone can \u201copt out\u201d of hustle culture<\/a>. Many young Indians are the first in their families to earn a stable income, support siblings\u2019 education, or pay off loans. For them, hustling isn\u2019t aesthetic, it\u2019s survival. Telling someone to rest when their rent depends on a bonus is cruel. But acknowledging the lack of choice doesn\u2019t mean we stop questioning the system. In fact, it makes the conversation even more urgent. We need to build workplaces, communities, and economies where mental health is not a personal luxury, but a collective priority.<\/p>\n We must start treating mental well-being not as an HR formality but as a core metric of success. Companies need to ask: are employees sleeping well? Can they take leave without guilt? Do they feel psychologically safe?<\/p>\n To shift the needle, organisations must go beyond token gestures like webinars or therapy reimbursements. They must redesign their systems: revise workload expectations, normalise boundaries, provide access to mental health professionals, and reward sustainable performance.<\/p>\n But change cannot stop at the corporate boardroom. In the informal sector, where most of India\u2019s workforce operates without protections, mental health support must be built into larger structural reform<\/a>s. Community-led and government-backed solutions are key: public clinics, helplines, rest and safety in labour laws, guaranteed minimum wages, and portable benefits like insurance, sick leave, and childcare. NGOs, local bodies, and municipal governments can play a powerful role in creating \u201ccare infrastructure\u201d in informal work zones: rest areas, mobile counselling units, or peer support groups. When people are working 12-hour shifts just to survive, rest should not be a luxury. It should be a right. <\/p>\n More broadly, our schools, homes, and public discourse must stop treating mental health as a personal failing and begin offering real tools for resilience. We need to inculcate emotional education, safe spaces to talk, and language to navigate fear, fatigue, and failure.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/opinion\/op-ed\/tnty39\/article68737630.ece\/alternates\/SQUARE_80\/iStock-859251712.jpg\")
What can we do?<\/p>\n
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A more honest future<\/p>\n