Corporate India doth murder sleep

NEW DELHI: India Inc may have weathered the impact of global financial crisis well but a quarter of corporate employees are so much burdened with work due to tough targets set by employers that they get less than six hours of sleep every day, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) said in a health s t a t u s surve y on Wednesday.

As a result, employees suffer from high stressed levels, hypertension, diabetes and other ailments.

Loss of sleep has also wide-ranging effects, including daytime fatigue, physical discomfort, psychological stress, performance deterioration and low pain threshold and even increasing absenteeism, the report said.

The report said 30 percent of respondents hardly exercised and a further 25 percent said they exercised less than an hour in the entire week.

Releasing the findings of the report, Assocham secretary-general D S Rawat said even the National Commission on Sleep Disorders has said that sleep deprivation costs US $150 billion a year in higher stress and reduced workplace productivity.

Findings further revealed that 21 percent of respondents said they felt fatigue on a regular basis due to sleep disorders and close to 17 percent of participants in the survey admitted that they suffered from regular headache.

Sleep disorders caused depression among 13 percent of respondents.

Asserting that chronic diseases would impact productivity, the report recommended that under Section 17 of the Income Tax Act, medical reimbursement to corporate employees should be exempted from tax up to a ceiling of Rs 50,000 per annum and expenditure incurred in approved hospitals should also be fully reimbursed by employers considering increase in cost inflow index.