By Bruhaspati Samal
For decades, a curious contradiction has remained embedded in the working structure of the Central Government: employees belonging to the same broad public-service system are governed by different weekly working regimes merely because one category is described as “administrative” and another as “operative”. While administrative offices of the Government of India generally observe a five-day week, large sections of operative establishments, including the Postal Department, continue to function on a six-day basis.
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The issue goes beyond whether Saturday should be declared a holiday. It concerns equality of status, the equitable distribution of working time and the dignity of labour. If a five-day week is considered appropriate for efficient public administration, the rationale for denying the same arrangement to employees performing essential public services deserves serious examination.
Figures provided by the National Federation of Postal Employees illustrate the disparity. For postal operative staff, the calculation is: 17 closed holidays + 10 days of Casual Leave and Restricted Holidays + no closed Saturdays + 52 Sundays/weekly offs = 79 days. This leaves 286 working days annually. At eight hours a day, the total is 2,288 working hours.
For administrative staff, the calculation is: 17 closed holidays + 10 days of Casual Leave and Restricted Holidays + 52 closed Saturdays + 52 Sundays/weekly offs = 131 days. This leaves 234 working days. At 8.5 hours a day, the annual total is 1,989 hours. Thus, according to these figures, postal operative staff work 299 additional hours annually, equivalent to nearly 37.4 eight-hour working days.
Postal services are undoubtedly operational. India Post provides counter services, processes mail and parcels, delivers correspondence and offers financial and other public-facing services that cannot simply cease over weekends. However, the operational nature of a service cannot, by itself, justify a permanently higher annual workload. Rotational duties, staggered schedules, shift systems, rational staff deployment and compensatory arrangements could maintain essential services without requiring every employee to follow the same six-day schedule. The question is whether this regime remains necessary for individual employees or persists merely as an inherited administrative practice.
The experience of other public-service institutions strengthens the case for review. Banks are operational establishments involving customer-facing counters, cash transactions and financial services. Yet public-sector bank employees enjoy holidays on the second and fourth Saturdays, while the remaining Saturdays are working days. The demand for a complete five-day banking week remains a live issue.
The Government has acknowledged that the second and fourth Saturdays were declared holidays in 2015. As of September 28, 2026, a proposed three-day bank strike over the five-day-week demand had been deferred after the Indian Banks’ Association and the United Forum of Bank Unions agreed to establish a high-level committee to examine declaring the remaining Saturdays as holidays and explore alternatives acceptable to stakeholders, including customers.
This development strengthens the case for a broader review. Arguments for a five-day banking week include changing customer behaviour, digital banking, productivity, technological transformation, employee welfare and rationalisation of working time. If these considerations justify revising working arrangements in one public-oriented service, they deserve examination elsewhere.
Differences between comparable establishments should rest on transparent, evidence-based operational requirements rather than administrative classification alone.
The constitutional dimension is equally important. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the laws, while Article 16 provides for equality of opportunity in public employment. These provisions do not require identical working arrangements for every employee, irrespective of their duties. Reasonable classification is constitutionally permissible, but it must have a rational connection with the objective sought to be achieved.
The distinction between administrative and operative staff should not, therefore, become an unquestioned basis for granting one category 52 additional weekly holidays while requiring another to work on those days year after year.
The issue also concerns productivity and human dignity. An additional 299 hours annually is not merely a statistical difference; it represents time that could otherwise be devoted to family, education, social responsibilities, rest and personal well-being.
The Confederation of Central Government Employees and Workers, Odisha State Coordination Committee, raised this issue before the Eighth Central Pay Commission (CPC) during its visit to Bhubaneswar in August 2026. It requested a comprehensive Working Hours Equity Review covering annual working hours, the justification for Saturday attendance, staffing patterns, productivity, shift and rotational arrangements, compensatory measures, and practices followed by comparable public-sector and government institutions.
If a five-day week is considered efficient and productive in administrative offices, banks, LIC and other organisations, its applicability to Central Government operative establishments should also be examined.
The objective is not to impose identical schedules on every establishment, but to ensure that differences in working time are justified by demonstrable operational needs. Employees belonging to the same broad public-service framework should not face substantially unequal annual workloads merely because of their administrative classification. It is time to move beyond the five-day-versus-six-day debate and embrace a fundamental principle: equal work deserves equal status, and equal status demands an equitable distribution of working hours.
The writer is a Service Union Representative and a Communist.
