Productivity and working hours

The other day I read about Murthy Sir having talked about 70 hr work in a week along with other points. I completely agree to the point of improving work productivity and reducing bureaucratic delays. These are definitely detrimental to taking India to the next level. A recent experience of passport renewal. My passport renewal took 33 calendar days. Day 1 - submission at the PSK. Day 3 - sent for police verification. Day 9 - called for police verification. Day 31 - verified file sent back to passport office, and passport printed. Day 32 - dispatched. Day 33 - I received it. About 85% time was spent on police verification and files being sent back and forth. There is tremendous scope to improve and easily deliver renewed passport within 1 or max 2 weeks time. There will be tons of other services where delays happen, for no obvious reason. So yes, higher productivity is needed`.

That said, I do not agree to the 70 hr work week. For a min, let's assume the 5 day work week trend. This means we work for 14 hrs a day, which means If I start work at 8 am, I will work till 10 pm. Where is my life in this? Only on weekends, assuming no one calls from office. We can extend to 6 days a week, which means about 11.5 hrs of work per day or extend it further to make it 7 days 10 hrs a day, but then I am left with Zero days for self. Am I supposed to only work and have no personal life at all to make India a productive nation. Is that even a productive/developed Nation?

My issue is with the concept itself. Co-relating productivity with number of hours is a failed methodology, that quality teams had used for many years to calculate work or project productivity. In software industry we also used lines of code as a measure. In time, with code reuse becoming popular, we used to write less new code, or even ended up removing defunct code, landing ourselves with negative productivity or quality measures. With years of experience, better, faster machines, it meant less time to do the same work. We were more productive without spending more hours.

For any organization or state or nation to progress, productivity needs to be high, but so should be the people morale. Underpaid, overworked employees will never be able to give quality output and the more you get them to work extra hours, the lower the quality of output will be. More productivity comes from happier motivated employees and not by counting hours.

Productivity is a mindset, is an attitude and has more to do with the right skills. As employees, we have all gone the extra mile, when required, but also along with regular breaks and off time. 70 hrs work week, will not be an absolute condition, but my personal take is, it is better to keep the focus on getting work done in a time that is reasonable and not unduly delay things or sit on tasks for days/weeks.

Thoughts?