Does India Have a Right to Disconnect?

8 min read · Work · Policy

Someone in your leadership team has read that France banned work emails after 6pm, or that Australia has made it illegal to message staff at night, and has asked whether India is next and whether you need a policy. Both of those things are false, and the truth is more useful.

India has no right to disconnect law. A private member's bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 5 December 2025 and remains pending, and earlier versions in 2018 and 2021 both lapsed. France has required employers to negotiate on the issue since 2017, and Australia gave employees a right to refuse contact from 2024.

Neither of those countries banned after hours contact. That misreading is the single most common thing HR teams get wrong here.

What Is Actually Happening in India?

A bill exists, and the odds are against it.

On 5 December 2025, MP Supriya Sule introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 in the Lok Sabha. It is a private member's bill, meaning it was introduced by an individual MP rather than by the government. It remains pending. She introduced earlier versions on 28 December 2018 and 3 December 2021, and both lapsed.

The base rate here is worth knowing before anyone builds a plan around it. Since 1952, only fourteen private member's bills have become law in India, and the last one to pass did so in 1968. So a policy decision that assumes this bill will pass is a policy decision resting on something that has happened fourteen times in seventy odd years.

Meanwhile the actual operative law says nothing about it. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 came into force on 21 November 2025 and regulates working hours and overtime. It has no concept of connection time, meaning the hours in which an employee is expected to remain reachable. Someone replying to a message at 11pm is not working in any sense Indian statute currently recognises.

What Does France's Law Actually Require?

Negotiation, not prohibition, and the gap between those two words is where most of the confusion lives.

The right to disconnect entered the French Code du travail through the loi Travail of 8 August 2016, known as the El Khomri law, and came into force on 1 January 2017. It sits at Article L2242-17.

What it obliges companies with at least fifty employees to do is include the right to disconnect in their mandatory annual negotiation on gender equality and quality of working life. Where no agreement is reached, the employer must draw up a charter, after consulting the social and economic committee, setting out how the right is exercised and providing training and awareness for employees and for supervisory and management staff on reasonable use of digital tools.

So the French requirement is procedural. Agree rules, or write them down yourself, and train people on them. It does not tell a French manager they may not send an email at 9pm.

What Did Australia Actually Change?

It gave the employee a right to refuse, and it did not take away the employer's right to make contact.

The Fair Work Ombudsman sets it out plainly. The right started on 26 August 2024 for employers with fifteen or more employees, and on 26 August 2025 for small business employers. An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. It covers contact from third parties such as clients, not only from the employer.

Whether a refusal is unreasonable is decided against factors that must be considered: the reason for the contact, how the contact is made and how disruptive it is, how much the person is compensated for being available or for working extra hours, their role and level of responsibility, and their personal circumstances including caring responsibilities. Refusing is unreasonable if the contact is required by law.

Every modern award had to include a right to disconnect term by August 2024. Disputes go to the workplace first, then to the Fair Work Commission, which can make a stop order. And it is a workplace right under general protections, so an employer must not prevent someone from using it.

Read both regimes together and the shape is the same. France makes you write the rules down. Australia lets people decline without being punished for it. Neither country switched off the phone.

The European Parliament has pushed for more. In a resolution adopted by 472 votes to 126 with 83 abstentions, it called on the Commission to legislate a right to disconnect at EU level. That has not yet produced a directive.

Why Does Any of This Have Evidence Behind It?

Because the ability to stop thinking about work is measurable, and the things that break it are known.

Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz call it psychological detachment, meaning refraining from work related thoughts and tasks during nonwork time. In their 2015 review in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, the pattern across diary, longitudinal and cross sectional studies is consistent: job stressors, workload above all, predict low detachment, and low detachment predicts strain, exhaustion and poorer wellbeing. Their own practical recommendation is aimed at supervisors, who they say should model detachment behaviour and stop assigning work into off hours, including the softer version where someone is asked to have a think about something tonight and come back in the morning.

The World Health Organization's 2022 guidelines on mental health at work list long working hours and shift work among recognised psychosocial hazards, associating them with symptoms of depression, with increased likelihood of new risky alcohol use, and with increased odds of suicidal ideation.

That is a stronger evidence base than most workplace policies rest on, and it exists whether or not the bill passes.

What Can an Indian Employer Do Without a Law?

Nearly everything both regimes require, starting on Monday, at no legislative cost.

Write down the hours. France's fallback position, when negotiation fails, is a written charter. You can produce the same document without anyone obliging you to. State when people are expected to be reachable, and when they are not.

Define what counts as genuinely urgent. Australia's reasonableness test turns on the reason for the contact and how disruptive it is. Most organisations have never distinguished between something that cannot wait until 9am and something that merely occurred to someone at 10pm.

Pay for availability, or stop expecting it. Both regimes treat compensation for being on call as directly relevant. If a role genuinely requires out of hours reachability, name it in the role and pay for it. If it does not, stop treating responsiveness at night as a signal of commitment.

Train the managers, not the staff. The French requirement extends explicitly to supervisory and management staff. The Sonnentag and Fritz recommendation is aimed at supervisors. A team takes its norms from whoever sends the last message of the day.

Protect the person who declines. The Australian protection exists because a right nobody dares use is not a right. If your senior people say the policy exists and then remember who answered at midnight, you have a poster rather than a practice.

We work with Indian employers on exactly this kind of programme, so weigh that paragraph accordingly. The underlying point stands without us: everything above is available to any company today, and none of it requires a private member's bill to pass.

Which is the honest summary. The most likely outcome for the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 is that it lapses like the two before it. That would tell you something about Indian legislative process and nothing at all about whether your team can stop thinking about work. We have written about what that costs inside Indian workplaces, and about what it looks like once it has gone too far. Neither of those pieces is waiting on Parliament, and neither are you.

What Else Do People Ask About the Right to Disconnect?