The Holiday Equation

Recently, someone did a calculation on the number of days in a year on which people did not have to go to work. Such calculations will vary somewhat, because non-government offices are not as generous as government offices in the matter of granting holidays. In Assam, apart from the 52 Sundays and 26 alterte Saturdays there are about 34 public holidays in a year. This adds up to about 112 days of paid leave not counting the additiol quantum of persol leave that government employees are entitled to. Adding 15 more days of persol leave, one comes up with a rough tally of 127 days of leave in a year. This is margilly more than one-third of the year. There are turally legitimate comments being made about how so many holidays adversely affect the work culture of any State. We tend to forget that most Western countries have five working days in a week. This means that almost all workers in such countries have 104 days of paid leave by just adding up their Saturdays and Sundays. In addition, some countries have seven public holidays and some have 14, with quite a few countries making do with nine or 10. The difference is not all that great. What makes the real difference in terms of work culture is the quantum of work that gets done on working days. This is where there is a vast difference between the work ethics of advanced countries and Assam. Here we have a whole lot of people who just go to office on working days. Who said anything about working?