We seem to have convinced ourselves that the misuse of mobile phones is a problem confined to schools. We expect students to give up their phones to concentrate fully on learning. We applaud when strict policies confiscate devices and enforce discipline in classrooms. Yet the same society that cheers for student discipline falls silent when public employees spend hours scrolling social media, watching videos, or chatting during work hours—while citizens wait helplessly for essential services.

This hypocrisy should alarm us. The cost of distraction in public offices is not theoretical—it is a daily burden on millions. If a single government employee spends only one hour daily on personal mobile use, over a year that amounts to 264 hours—more than 33 full workdays lost. Now consider a department with 1,000 employees: every month, 22,000 hours disappear into private distractions—time stolen from the public. This is why files gather dust for months, patients languish without attention, property records remain incomplete, and citizens plead for the most basic entitlements.

Ironically, the same society that cannot tolerate a student sending a text message in class seems unbothered when public servants binge-watch television on duty. We call this a harmless habit. But it is not harmless—it is an abuse of public trust and resources.

The most dangerous lesson we are teaching our children is that accountability is conditional, and ethics are age-bound—that as you grow older, you grow out of responsibility. This is not just unfair; it is corrosive. It undermines the principle that those in positions of authority should be held to the highest standards, not the lowest.

The reality is that responsibility should grow with experience and power. It is unacceptable that a ninth-grade student can be punished for checking a phone, while an office clerk faces no consequences for hours spent idly browsing. If schools can enforce mobile discipline, so can government offices. If teenagers can set aside their devices to focus on learning, surely adults paid to serve the public can do the same.

Imagine if public offices applied the same standards we impose on students: mobile phones permitted only during breaks or emergencies, basic feature phones issued to frontline staff, time-tracking tools installed to flag excessive personal use, and public display boards showing pending files and average service times. Training sessions could regularly remind employees that their working hours are not private property, but a collective asset. Repeated violations would not be excused as harmless—they would be met with formal warnings, pay cuts, or suspensions, as they would in any professional environment.

This is not an anti-technology argument. India has proven with Aadhaar, DigiLocker, and the UMANG app that digital tools can make governance faster and more transparent. But when technology is used without any discipline, it becomes a vehicle for indifference and decay.

It is time for a national conversation about a uniform digital discipline policy across government departments. Such a policy should mandate that personal use of mobile phones during work hours is strictly limited. Frontline employees—health workers, clerks, police—should be given basic phones that allow only essential calls and texts. Time-tracking and monitoring tools should be implemented with appropriate safeguards for privacy but clear accountability for misuse. Public dashboards should display clear metrics of performance and pending workloads, visible to every citizen. Regular training should reinforce that public time is sacred. And finally, a robust system of rewards and penalties should recognize departments that model responsible conduct and penalize those that routinely waste public hours.

We must stop pretending that discipline is the exclusive burden of the young. Real accountability does not begin with children—it begins with the adults they learn from. If we expect a student to put away a phone and concentrate, we must expect the same maturity from every government employee whose salary is paid by the public.

A mature democracy is built not only on rules and systems but on a culture of equal responsibility across all sectors. It is built on the understanding that ethical behaviour is not a phase of childhood—it is the foundation of civic life. Let us not waste any more public time. It is time to stop this hypocrisy and demand the same standards of discipline from those who hold power as we do from those who are still learning.

(Author is a senior journalist and commentator.)