- Monday, March 10, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Indian minister of state for electronics and information technology (IT) and skill development Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday (23) spoke on moonlighting, an issue which has created a controversy in the country’s IT world at the moment, saying companies should not restrict employees’ dreams.
“Today’s youngsters have every sense of confidence and purpose about wanting to monetise, create more values put of his or her own skills. So, the efforts of companies that want to pin their employees down and say that you should not work on your own start-up are doomed to fail,” he was quoted by Moneycontrol as saying.
Chandrasekhar’s remarks came at a time when software major Wipro has sacked 300 employees for moonlighting while its peer Infosys warned its workers that moonlighting could also lead to their termination.
Infosys said in an email that it “strictly discourages dual employment” and called moonlighting as a practice of having a second job during or outside the regular business hours.
“Any captive models will fade. Employers expect employees to be entrepreneurial while serving them. The same people can apply it personally to themselves,” the minister said at the 9th Annual Forum 2022 of the Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI) in New Delhi.
“Time will come where there will be a community of product builders who will divide their time on multiple projects. Just like lawyers or consultants do. This is the future of work,” he opined.
By moonlighting, it means people holding more than one full-time job besides their nine-to-five employment. It also includes those who take up part-time work on the side and is something not limited to the IT sector.
it became prominent when the employees working from home during moonlighting took up the additional work with nobody supervising.
Aditya Narayan Mishra, chief executive officer of CIEL HR Services, told Moneycontrol that three primary drivers determined employees moonlighting — time, passion or an additional source of income without being questioned.
