Image For Representaion
NEW DELHI: On May 10 2026 Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a gathering and made an appeal that landed differently in every boardroom it reached. “Both government and private offices should encourage work from home,” he said. “Arrangements for online meetings should be considered wherever possible.”
The appeal was part of his seven-point Nation First initiative a response to the West Asia crisis that has pushed crude oil above $100 per barrel and driven the rupee to record-low territory near ₹95 against the dollar. PM framed it not as policy but as patriotism. “Patriotism is not only about the willingness to sacrifice one’s life on the border,” he said. “In these times it is about living responsibly and fulfilling our duties to the nation in our daily lives.”
To understand how professionals themselves view the idea, Beats in Brief spoke to employees across Delhi-NCR working in finance, IT, pharma, marketing and media. Their responses revealed broad support for hybrid work particularly for savings, productivity and work-life balance while also highlighting concerns around isolation and reduced workplace interaction.
What Delhi-NCR Professionals Told Beats in Brief
Professionals across Delhi-NCR that Beats in Brief spoke to painted a consistent picture one that sits between Modi’s appeal and corporate India’s hesitation.
A finance professional based in Gurugram described hybrid work as having shifted the focus “from just sitting at a desk to actually getting results while giving employees more flexibility to balance their professional and personal lives.” An IT professional in Noida said WFH “enables an individual to balance personal life alongside professional life and enhances productivity and in turn growth and development altogether.” A pharma professional in Ghaziabad made the most direct economic argument “reduction of travel time provides more productivity time.” A marketing professional in Noida put it simply “better work life balance with good amount of savings.”
The financial reality they describe is measurable. A professional commuting 30 kilometres daily in a petrol vehicle spends approximately ₹150 to ₹300 on fuel and transit alone. Add office food, parking and incidental expenses and the daily cost of going to office runs between ₹500 and ₹900. Working from home reduces that to ₹160 to ₹290 a net daily saving of ₹340 to ₹610. For an entry-level professional earning ₹35,000 per month commuting costs can consume nearly 20% of take-home pay.
The dissent was equally consistent across conversations. Isolation and reduced social interaction came up in every sector IT, HR, finance, media and pharma. Several professionals flagged the blurring of work and personal life as a genuine cost of full-time remote work. The consensus was not WFH or office. It was hybrid a structured combination that preserves flexibility while protecting the collaboration and social connection that full-time remote work quietly erodes.
Why the Numbers Support the Appeal
India’s petroleum vulnerability makes the WFH(Work From Home) argument straightforward on paper. India’s crude import dependency stands at 88.6% of domestic requirements with a substantial share of those imports sourced from West Asia. The crude oil import bill for FY2025-26 reached $123.1 billion provisionally according to the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell. The rupee has depreciated approximately 9% over the fiscal year. The RBI reportedly intervened heavily in forex markets through FY26 to defend the currency.
Road transport sits at the centre of this vulnerability. It consumes 44% of India’s total oil supply and accounts for 94% of transport-related carbon dioxide emissions. Within road transport personal vehicles cars and two-wheelers account for 45% of fuel consumption. Passenger cars alone account for 25%.
The commute numbers from MoveInSync’s Q1 2025 report make the daily scale concrete. Bengaluru professionals travel 15 kilometres each way in 49 minutes, Delhi-NCR workers cover 20 kilometres in 60 minutes, Mumbai commuters travel 17 kilometres in 55 minutes and Chennai workers cover 21 kilometres in 50 minutes. Every working day millions of vehicles burn fuel to move office workers from home to desk and back slowly, expensively and in congestion.
The Fuel Saving Calculation
India’s IT-ITES sector employs approximately 5.8 million professionals the primary WFH-eligible pool. Applying a 75% private vehicle commute share gives an active commuting base of approximately 4.35 million workers. At a blended fleet efficiency of 25 kilometres per litre and a 35-kilometre daily round trip each commuter burns approximately 1.75 litres daily.
At 20% WFH adoption approximately 870,000 workers the daily fuel saving is approximately 1.22 million litres. Annualised across 250 working days that is 304.5 million litres or approximately 1.9 million barrels of crude. At $100 per barrel that translates to an annual forex saving of approximately $191 million.
The estimate is illustrative and based on average commuting assumptions. These are not transformational numbers relative to India’s $123 billion crude import bill. But they represent meaningful directional relief particularly when combined with reduced gold purchases and outbound travel cuts that PM simultaneously appealed for.
Anupam Mittal, Founder of Shaadi.com, demonstrated the micro-level arithmetic when he shifted his 500-employee workforce to one WFH day per week. “Kabhi socha nahin,” he posted on social media, “but 1 day remote for 500 employees means 30,000 litres of petrol saved a year.”
The Structural Limit
Here is what the appeal cannot change through goodwill alone. An IGIDR study linked to RBI research found that WFH-eligible occupations employ less than 20% of India’s total workforce. Only 8% of India’s population works in the organised sector. The IT-ITES sector that can most easily adopt WFH represents less than 1.5% of the total national workforce.
India’s 250 million metric tonne petroleum habit is not primarily a white-collar commuting problem. It is a freight problem, a logistics problem and a public transport gap. The IT professional working from home in Bengaluru saves real fuel. But that saving is a fraction of the diesel that moves goods across 6.3 million kilometres of road network daily.
Energy infrastructure expert Subhash Datta has also cautioned that benefits are partially offset by residential demand shifts increased air conditioning, home appliances and personal internet equipment raise residential electricity consumption by 7 to 23% depending on season and home size.
What Corporate India Is Actually Doing
Harpreet Singh Saluja, President of the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate, formally petitioned the Union Ministry of Labour to issue an advisory directing IT and ITES companies to implement WFH wherever feasible. “The Indian IT sector had already successfully implemented large-scale work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic without disruption to productivity or business continuity,” he argued. “The IT-ITES sector has both the infrastructure and capability to once again support national priorities through remote working.”
Pratik Vaidya, Managing Director at Karma Management Global Consulting Solutions, offered a more measured position “The better approach is calibrated hybrid work, fewer physical meetings and reduced non-essential travel. Not panic-driven shutdowns.”
Over 70% of Indian companies had already adopted some form of hybrid or remote work policy by 2024 according to NASSCOM survey data. IT sector attrition fell to 17.4% in 2024 its lowest since 2020 with WFH flexibility widely credited as a contributing factor. A Stanford and Nature-published study found that hybrid work arrangements reduce employee attrition by 33% without measurable productivity loss.
Singapore offers the clearest global benchmark. The Ministry of Manpower reports that 72.7% of Singapore employers offer formal flexible work arrangements with 84.8% offering some form of remote option. Three in five Singapore employers report direct productivity gains. Japan where 24.6% of employees actively telework has used remote work as part of a deliberate national energy import reduction strategy the closest parallel to PM’s appeal anywhere in the world.
What Would Actually Sustain the Shift
PM’s appeal can change a conversation. It cannot by itself change infrastructure. The three barriers that professionals and companies consistently cite are residential power stability particularly in tier-2 cities, broadband quality outside metro areas and home space constraints in dense urban apartments.
Three structural changes would convert the appeal into lasting policy impact accelerated optical fiber rollout to tier-2 and tier-3 districts, corporate tax deductions for verified hybrid arrangements and home office expenditure and mandatory WFH SOPs for non-essential public sector employees and PSU staff.
Whether enough companies act on it to move the forex needle is a question that the next quarterly import data will begin to answer.
About the Author
