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There is a peculiar silence in Indian workplaces today — the kind that doesn’t announce itself, but accumulates. It gathers in the pauses between meetings, in the deep breaths people take before another long day, in the headaches dismissed as “just stress,” in the quiet fatigue that doesn’t stop anyone from working but keeps them from living fully. It is the silence of deteriorating health — not dramatic, not sudden, but constant — and it has become one of the most expensive problems companies and countries have chosen not to see.
India’s workforce is young, ambitious, and stretched thin. And while the conversations about employee health in India often surface around insurance, gym reimbursements, or mental health days, the reality is more complex. According to Plum’s Employee Health Report 2025, employees collectively lose up to 40 workdays per person each year because of poor health — a figure so large that it is almost invisible in its familiarity. We know people fall sick. We know stress is high. But we rarely recognise the staggering scale of productivity being siphoned away, not in loud emergencies but in small, daily erosions.
This cost isn’t just a line item on an HR dashboard or a CFO’s spreadsheet. It’s an entire shadow economy — one that affects national GDP, company output, and the everyday life of millions. And because it is dispersed across individuals, departments, and months of the year, it feels like a natural part of modern work instead of what it really is: a preventable drag on the country’s potential.
The numbers make it clear that this is not an individual failing but a structural one. Seventy-one percent of India’s workforce is already at moderate risk of chronic disease, a statistic that reveals both the breadth of the problem and the urgency to rethink what a healthy workplace actually means.
Chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease — illnesses that should have belonged to the fifties and sixties — are now arriving in the thirties. The report notes that India sees chronic diseases a full decade earlier than developed nations. And they arrive quietly, disguised as a skipped breakfast, a tension headache, a month of poor sleep, a breathlessness one assumes is just lack of fitness.
What’s even more striking is how poorly equipped Indian employees are to detect or prevent these conditions. Plum’s data shows that 62 percent of employees do not undergo regular health screenings, meaning problems are often diagnosed only when they’ve advanced enough to disrupt daily life. And yet, screening is precisely where the earliest savings lie — in the diseases that never fully develop, the hospitalisations that never occur, the workdays that are never lost.
If the physical toll is dramatic, the economic one is even more so. India’s productivity crisis is not driven by laziness or lack of skill; it is driven by illness. Chronic diseases alone account for 30 days of productive time lost per employee each year. Acute illnesses add another 8 to 12 days. And presenteeism — working through illness — may be the biggest thief of all, because it hides its damage behind apparent commitment. People show up for work, but not as their full selves. Tasks take longer. Errors multiply. Creativity drops. Decision-making falters. Teams absorb the slack. This is how companies lose revenue without ever noticing the hole in the bottom of the bucket.
This pattern plays out at the national level too. A country where illness begins early and screening begins late is a country forced to spend decades treating what could have been prevented. When large segments of the population spend their prime years managing conditions like diabetes, anxiety, hypertension, or musculoskeletal pain, the nation pays for it through reduced GDP growth, higher healthcare spending, and a shrinking pool of truly productive years. Health economists call this the “loss of healthy life years.” Businesses know it as burnout, churn, low output, and disengagement. Families feel it as financial pressure and emotional strain.
But macroeconomics only tells half the story. The other half is deeply human.
Behind every day of lost productivity is a person who woke up exhausted, or in pain, or afraid of what a doctor might say, or unable to sleep, or managing symptoms quietly so their team isn’t inconvenienced. It is the new parent fighting migraines from sleep deprivation, the 28-year-old ignoring recurring stomach issues, the 35-year-old managing early hypertension alone, the mid-career woman navigating hormonal shifts without workplace support. Poor health is not abstract; it is intimate.
It is also contagious, emotionally and socially. A team member in chronic pain is less patient, less present, more irritable. A manager overwhelmed by mental strain unknowingly passes down stress. A colleague working through illness normalises self-neglect.
Workplaces are ecosystems — when one person struggles, everyone feels the ripple.
The Employee Health Report 2025 also reveals another silent cost: the cost of caregiving. Seventy-three percent of employees worry more about their family’s health than their own, and 70 percent of insurance claims under employer policies go toward dependents.
Caring for an unwell parent or spouse costs an employee ₹80,000 a year and hours of lost time each week. What began as a personal responsibility becomes a professional burden — not because people don’t want to care for their families, but because caregiving doesn’t pause for meetings, deadlines, or workdays.
Women, expectedly, pay this price more steeply. They spend nearly ten times more hours on unpaid domestic labour than men, according to ILO figures referenced in the report. Their health declines faster, their stress accumulates quicker, and their dissatisfaction with employer healthcare plans — seven in ten are unhappy with what is available — is not simply about coverage but about recognition.
And then there is loneliness, one of the least spoken-about drivers of poor health. Plum’s research finds that 30 percent of employees experience loneliness at work — the highest globally — and that remote workers feel it most. Loneliness isn’t just emotional discomfort; it increases the risk of chronic illness, depression, and early mortality. If physical health is the body’s infrastructure, social health is its electricity — invisible, but essential.
The tragedy is not that India is facing a health crisis; it’s that this crisis is largely preventable.
The same report shows that companies investing in preventive healthcare saw a 30–45 percent reduction in productivity loss and that every ₹100 invested in health benefits saves the employee ₹296 in healthcare expenses. Prevention is not just cheaper than cure; it is dramatically more profitable. And preventive care doesn’t only mean annual screenings — it means telehealth access, flexible work arrangements, mental-health support, family coverage, nutrition programs, and redesigned workloads that treat people as organisms, not machines.
The country is beginning to wake up to this. There has been a 100 percent surge in organisations purchasing group insurance for the first time, and a similar rise in companies experimenting with flexible healthcare benefits. But the shift will remain incomplete until we recognise that health is not an employee perk; it is an economic strategy. Healthy people build healthy companies. Healthy companies build healthy economies.
The silent cost of poor health becomes loud only in hindsight — after attrition spikes, after medical claims surge, after a high-potential employee quietly burns out, after a team loses momentum because everyone is stretched. But it can be addressed in foresight if workplaces adopt a simple principle: wellbeing is infrastructure.
India’s long-term economic story will not be written only in factories or fintech innovations; it will be written in the vitality of its people. The future of work in India will belong not to the busiest companies, but the healthiest ones — the ones that recognise that a workforce is not an input to be optimised, but a living system that thrives when cared for.
A healthy workplace is, ultimately, the most profitable workplace.
And the silent cost of poor health is only silent until someone decides to listen.
