What if India’s greatest growth multiplier is not in factories or fintech, but in the minds of its people? What if a thriving, mentally resilient workforce could add more to GDP than any trade reform or tax cut? What if the next leap in competitiveness comes not from cost efficiency, but from healthier, sharper, more engaged employees? And what if safeguarding mental well-being is the key to converting our demographic dividend into the most enduring asset of India’s rise?
India’s economic ascent is increasingly being tested by a headwind: stress, burnout and depression in its workforce. Without any research data, most of us anecdotally are aware of this, in our own circles. A Deloitte analysis found that poor mental health already drains employers of around $14 billion a year through absenteeism, presenteeism and attrition – numbers large enough to dent profits, slow productivity and blunt competitiveness.
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Mental health crisis: An overlooked economic challenge
The macroeconomic cost is no less sobering. The World Health Organisation estimates that between 2012 and 2030, India will forfeit about $1.03 trillion in output because of mental health conditions. What is too often dismissed as a human resources concern is, in reality, a systemic economic challenge. But this erodes labour supply, depresses productivity growth and threatens the very foundations of the demographic dividend.
Global experience reinforces this warning. In 2019 alone, 12 billion working days were lost to depression and anxiety, at a cost of roughly $1 trillion in productivity. Around 15 per cent of working-age adults live with a mental health condition. This gives the workplace a double charge: it can either protect well-being through meaningful work, community and structure, or it can corrode it, undermining attendance, performance and even the capacity to remain economically active.
The diagnosis is now incontrovertible. The question is whether India’s policy frameworks and corporate strategies are equal to the scale of the problem. The honest answer is that while progress is visible, adequacy is not.
Despite mounting evidence, both corporate India and government systems have yet to act with the seriousness or urgency this crisis demands. Public spending remains paltry, many workplace initiatives are cosmetic, and disclosure norms lack rigour. It strikes at the heart of India’s economic future. A young workforce cannot sustain growth if too many are anxious, disengaged or burnt out. Unless mental health is treated as a pillar of productivity, the demographic dividend risks becoming a demographic liability.
Signals from the workforce
The warnings from employees themselves are unmissable. Gallup’s 2025 snapshot found that nearly 30 per cent of Indian workers face daily stress, and close to half are contemplating leaving their jobs, a direct threat to retention and continuity of skills.
Even critical professions are under strain. Research published in the Journal of the Association of Physicians of India reported that one in four doctors is experiencing burnout, with obvious implications for patient care and the resilience of health systems.
Yet too many organisations still relegate mental health to the margins of wellness, rather than embedding it as a determinant of productivity. Regulatory nudges such as SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework have pushed companies to disclose more on employee well-being. But metrics are shallow, inconsistent and rarely tied to accountability, leaving the gap between rhetoric and reality painfully wide.
Public policy responses: architecture and limitations
The state has not been passive. The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 enshrined the right to treatment. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) mandated coverage of mental illness under health insurance. The National Tele Mental Health Programme (Tele-MANAS) now runs 24×7 helplines in twenty languages, reinforced by a mobile application launched in 2024. As of April 2025, more than two million calls had been answered – an unmistakable signal of unmet need.
Yet architecture is not adequacy. Two constraints persist with stubborn force.
The first is fiscal. Union Budget allocations to mental health remain at barely one percent of the Health Ministry’s outlay, a sum wholly disproportionate to the burden of disease and the documented economic cost. Most of this limited spending accrues to apex institutions, with little flowing to district and community-level interventions where need is most acute.
The second is capacity. India has fewer than one psychiatrist per 100,000 people against a desirable benchmark of three. Shortages extend to psychologists, nurses and social workers, and the maldistribution is stark—large populated regions remain functionally unserved. Without urgent expansion of training pipelines and adoption of task-sharing models, even the best-designed policies will be defeated by sheer absence of human capital.
Corporate responsibility: rhetoric versus redesign
A forward-looking segment of India Inc. has begun to respond with Employee Assistance Programmes, flexible work, and insurance coverage for therapy and psychiatric care. Yet the median practice is reactive, and the gulf between rhetoric and redesign remains wide.
First, organisational design. Too many initiatives remain cosmetic – wellness weeks, awareness posters, token meditation apps – while structural determinants of distress are left intact. Chronic workload intensity, poor role clarity, limited autonomy and weak recognition corrode well-being at scale. The strategic task is to embed mental health into the architecture of work itself: calibrated targets, predictable schedules, equitable pay, and safeguards against digital overreach into personal time. Some multinationals are piloting workload audits, “right-to-disconnect” rules and redesigned shift rosters. These, however, are outliers.
Second, managerial capability. Supervisors form the first line of defence, yet most remain unequipped to detect distress or to restructure team practices. In India’s dense and hierarchical workplaces, a single manager can affect the sleep, stress and attrition of dozens of employees. Training in psychological first aid, empathetic communication and evidence-based workload allocation must become standard. Globally, progressive firms now embed mental health KPIs into managerial appraisals. Indian corporates must catch up.
Third, measurement and accountability. Companies track sales ratios and supply chains with forensic detail, but costs of presenteeism, burnout-linked attrition and underuse of assistance programmes remain invisible. Without metrics, there is no accountability. Evidence abroad is unequivocal: once leadership sees quantified data – lost workdays, therapy wait times, burnout-linked turnover – budgets shift and interventions scale. Indian enterprises that adopt such rigour will find mental health is not a cost centre but a lever of productivity and retention.
What adequacy would require
For government
- Fund where need manifests: redirect allocations towards district-level services, digital triage and community-based care, while sustaining centres of excellence for complex cases. Seamlessly integrate Tele-MANAS with District Mental Health Programmes to ensure continuity of care.
- Expand human capital: rapidly scale psychiatry and psychology training seats, institutionalise nurse- and counsellor-led care, and embed mental health competencies in MBBS, nursing and ASHA curricula. A time-bound target should raise the psychiatrist ratio from 0.75 to 3 per 100,000.
- Enforce true insurance parity: ensure IRDAI’s directive translates into real coverage with no exclusions, fair reimbursement and responsive grievance redress.
- Measure outcomes, not intentions: publish quarterly dashboards tracking call-to-care conversions, therapy completion, relapse rates and workforce growth.
For corporates
- Treat burnout as an organisational design flaw: audit workloads, shift patterns and meeting intensity, and remediate systemic inefficiencies.
- Institutionalise managerial accountability: mandate psychological safety and mental health literacy for all supervisory roles, linking appraisal to team well-being.
- Ensure parity in benefits: cover therapy, psychiatry and hospitalisation with the same standards as physical health, backed by confidentiality and transparent service norms.
- Embed financial accountability: report absenteeism, presenteeism and stress-linked attrition quarterly to leadership, and pilot redesigns such as compressed work weeks with rigorous measurement.
A productivity imperative
India will not reach its productivity frontier if large sections of its workforce remain exhausted, anxious or depressed. Both macroeconomic arithmetic and lived experience converge on a single conclusion: mental health is infrastructure.
Adequacy will require that we finance mental health as if we truly believed the data we already possess. It will require that managers be judged not only by outcomes, but by the integrity of how outcomes are achieved.