Centre weighs methods to quantify household chores done by women
India is exploring different methods to quantify the contribution of women's household chores to the country's GDP. The government may use the Time Use Survey, diary method and direct observation method to understand how Indian women spend their t...
India has begun an exercise to look at various methodologies to quantify the contribution of household chores performed by women to the country's gross domestic product (GDP).
The government is looking to make the Time Use Survey a regular feature to compute the amount of time women spend on household work. Discussions are on to explore other methods for computing female participation in household chores to understand how Indians, particularly women, spend their time, officials said.
Once the information is available on a regular basis, the government may come up with a methodology to quantify this work and its contribution to the GDP, as proposed in the Economic Survey 2022-23, they said.
"There is a discussion on conducting these surveys every five years to get a better understanding of time being spent, on a regular basis," said an official, who did not wish to be identified.
The 2019 Time Use Survey report had shown that women spent 299 minutes per day on average on unpaid domestic services for household members compared to 97 minutes spent by men.
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As per the official, the other methods that the government can use include the "diary method" and "direct observation method" to know how Indians spend their time.
The Time Use Survey provides a framework for measuring time dispositions by the population on different activities while in direct observation method, an officer observes the activities and in the diary method, those being surveyed have to record their activities after fixed intervals of time.
In 'unpaid caregiving services for household members', women spent 134 minutes a day, against 76 minutes spent by men, according to the survey report.
Experts, however, expressed scepticism on how this would help to add to India's GDP as personal consumption activities are currently not accounted for in the GDP. "Including household chores in national accounts is an issue because services for personal consumption and households are not part of the GDP," said former chief statistician Pronab Sen.
