Putting a price on women’s silent labours
India’s government in bid to fill data gaps to target welfare, policies
● India is trying to improve its jobs statistics with time-use surveys to estimate the value of unpaid work, especially household chores by women.
The government plans to start a yearlong exercise in January to survey households on how they spend their time, Debi Prasad Mondal, director-general of the National Sample Survey Office, said in an interview in New Delhi. Its findings will be released around June 2020 and the plan is to repeat it every three years.
“We will be able to understand how much time is spent in cooking and washing,” Mondal said in July.
The findings would give policymakers more information about employment in the economy and how to target welfare programmes.
The world’s fastest-growing major economy has some huge data gaps that make it difficult to get a good reading on what’s happening in key sectors, such as the jobs market, retail and housing.
About 700-million Indians, more than twice the population of the US, aren’t part of the workforce and their contribution at home isn’t recorded in the national income.
Globally, women work more than men. They perform around 75% of the world’s unpaid care and domestic work, valued at 13% of global GDP.
If included in national accounts, the unpaid care economy would represent between 15% to over 50% of GDP, according to a UN report.
The contrast is starker in India, where a large number of women never join the workforce or quit jobs to take care of children and the elderly at home.
Women make up 49% of the 1.3-billionstrong nation and spent about 352 minutes a day on unpaid work against 51.8 minutes by men.
India’s GDP can grow by 27% if women’s participation in the economy is raised to the same level as that of men, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) research.
The rate of women’s presence in the labour force is declining even as nearly 43% of them earn more than or equal to their spouses, the finance ministry’s Economic Survey showed.
“India’s labour and employment surveys broadly capture the work done by men. Many women are not in employment so we don’t get many details about them,” said Mondal.
A breakdown of how women spend time can help design policies that make their lives easier and bring electoral gains for governments. A case in point is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s programme to provide
We will be able to understand how much time is spent in cooking and washing
Debi Prasad Mondal Director-general of the National Sample Survey Office, India
cooking gas in rural India to help women save time spent collecting firewood. A timeuse survey will show how women are using this spare time.
The data can help policymakers draw inference for employment and welfare programmes, particularly for women and children, and generate more reliable estimates of workforce and national income.
The survey can be used to assess the reasons for shifts in labour participation rates and effects of policy changes on patterns of activities, government think-tank NITI Aayog said in a 2017 report.
The challenge for the government will be to put the data to use and address issues such as gender equality, women empowerment and unemployment. India first conducted pilots on time-use in six states in 1998, but didn’t follow it up with full-fledged surveys in the past 20 years.
“We didn’t do a time-use survey earlier because the needs of the country were different. Mostly developed countries have this because people are more concerned about employment,” Mondal said of the national survey that will include 150,000 households.