E-Paper
Endless shifts for women: Unpaid care work in India
This article is authored by Cchavi Vasisht, associate fellow, Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi.
India’s care economy, often also called as Purple Economy, represents one of the largest yet least acknowledged sectors within its socio-economic landscape. The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines care economy as a “set of activities related to the provision of care and support to individuals, households, and communities, including both paid and unpaid work.” Women are overrepresented in care roles like nurses, domestic workers, personal care workers, teachers, and childcare assistants as well as in unpaid care work which includes domestic services, care-giving (children, elderly, sick), and community/voluntary services.
While unpaid care work forms the bedrock of household and community wellbeing i.e. in sustaining families, enabling labour market participation of others, and supporting public services, it remains systematically excluded from formal economic calculations and policy priorities. Women across the globe work longer hours than men once unpaid domestic and care work enters the picture. The recent World Inequality Report 2026 highlights the persistent gender disparities in work hours and labour income globally. Women contribute the majority of total working hours when unpaid domestic labor is included but earn only 28.2% of global labor income in 2025.
In India, this disparity cuts even deeper. Women shoulder 84% of unpaid care time, work valued at 15 to 17% of GDP, while public spending on care infrastructure scrapes below 1%. India’s 2024 Time Use Survey tells a similar story. Women aged 15 to 59 devote 305 minutes daily to unpaid domestic chores, in comparison to men’s 88 minutes. And the effect is quite visible as female labor force participation is merely 33.7% against men’s 77%.
The scale of this invisibility is immense. India is going through demographic changes, including an aging population and increased urbanisation, which are driving a growing demand for care services. In rural areas, the drudgery of fetching water and fuel further marginalises women, stripping them of the time needed for education or paid work. And furthermore, during times of crisis, the burden increases for instance, during the Covid-19, the demand for care increased, especially for the older generation and even the schools were shut down, which pushed women out from their jobs, fulfilling these responsibilities in endless shifts.
It is important to understand that the division of labour is not a biological imperative but a socially engineered construct. For the policy analysts, understanding public economy is not a separate entity but is fueled by this hidden engine of division of labour and is critical for removing the barriers to women’s economic participation. Historically, classical sociologists tied gendered roles to biological traits. However, feminist critiques revealed that this division is socially constructed and is a mechanism of power.
According to recent estimates, women contribute 84% of the total time spent on unpaid care activities in India, undertaking responsibilities ranging from childcare and eldercare to cooking, cleaning, and managing household needs. Despite its indispensable nature, this labour is not accounted for in GDP figures, nor is it compensated, supported, or socially recognised. In fact, the ministry of women and child development reported in March 2024 that the imputed economic value of women’s unpaid domestic and care work stands between 15% and 17% of the GDP, figures comparable to, and even exceeding, key sectors like manufacturing or trade.
As early as the 2000s, the household satellite accounts were released in an attempt to bring unpaid household activities into the margin of national accounts. The state policies also dealt with unpaid care work through entitlements such as maternity and child care services, through schemes like the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), and Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahayog Yojana (IGMSY). The first time-use survey was a pilot study conducted in 1998-1999 by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) and the first all-India Time-Use Survey was conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) in 2019 and then in 2024. The empirical data in these surveys presents a stark picture of the highly gendered division of labour within Indian households. Women still carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic and care work, as illustrated in the charts below.
Women still supply far greater hours of unpaid work and only modest gains in paid working time--56 minutes in 2019 to 62 minutes in 2024. In contrast, men devoted close to four times as much time as women on paid activities (251 minutes vs. 62 minutes in 2024), clearly showing the time trade-off that women endure through their caregiving duties. Furthermore, the TUS data also indicates that this burden is more for women in rural and poor communities, where they tend to spend additional time on unpaid work because of limited access to minimum infrastructure such as water, fuel, energy and sanitation. Girls and older women, particularly in poorer households, carry a disproportionate burden, often at the expense of education and well-being.
What the above numbers suggest is that care remains feminised and devalued. This systemic time poverty does more than limit wages; it leads to a profound psychological and social depletion that compromises the national human capital. First, women face a severe "motherhood wage penalty." The choice to take informal or part-time work to manage care is often a forced response to a lack of public care infrastructure. Second, the double burden creates a state of perpetual exhaustion, more intense than an eight-hour paid job. Psychologically, women are caught in a double-bind. Society rewards niceness and nurturance, yet uses these same traits to exclude women from leadership roles. And third, when care is viewed as a female-only obligation, it locks families into poverty. Girls often drop out of school to assist with drudgery tasks, ensuring that the next generation remains equally marginalised.
To align economic growth with social justice and gender equity, there is a need to adopt a transformative policy response. The ILO’s 5Rs framework—recognise, reduce, redistribute, reward, and represent, offers actionable policy recommendations.
First, India ought to adopt a methodology which helps bring the invisible to visibility and making sure that the economic value of care is finally recognised. Second, while progress has been made by providing for 26 weeks maternity leave, it is important to adopt gender-neutral paternity leave to promote redistribution of care responsibilities. Third, there is a need for massive public and private investment to provide accessible and quality care infrastructure and services, ensuring redistributing caregiving from families to collective provision. Investing in creches close to workplaces, with qualified staff and longer hours, not only alleviates women's time poverty but also generates new jobs. Investing in basic infrastructure such as water, energy, and transport also lowers the drudgery and time effort involved in unpaid care.The government can enhance financial support for providing care services under Mission Shakti.
Fourth, policies can ensureregularisation of the care sector and ensure decent conditions of work for care workers. The anganwadi workers and domestic workers must be formally recognised, with minimum wages and working hours, in accordance with ILO Convention No. 189 on Domestic Workers. Finally, there is a need to update educational curricula for circulating balanced views of care work and encouraging gender-neutral advertising in the media.
India’s economic success story, marked by rising GDP, technological innovation, and infrastructure expansion, is in many ways, silently subsidised by the invisible labour of millions of women engaged in unpaid care work. This invisible economy, while vital to sustaining the productive economy, remains absent from national accounting systems, macroeconomic policy, and even mainstream discourse.
Recognising, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work is not just a feminist imperative—it is an economic necessity and a moral obligation. It aligns squarely with India’s constitutional commitments, its international obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5 (Gender Equality), SDG 8 (Decent Work), and SDG 10 (Reducing Inequalities). This involves rethinking how time, productivity, and labour are valued in economic models; investing robustly in care infrastructure such as anganwadis, community health centres, day-care facilities, and elderly care homes. Governments, employers, and communities must together create enabling conditions to unburden women and make care a collective societal function.
This article is authored by Cchavi Vasisht, associate fellow, Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi.
