Accounting for Unpaid Care Work in India-2019
Authors: Roy Aparna , Sekher TV 
Published: February 2025

In the ‘Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work’ report, 2018, estimates from64 countries show that 16.4 billion hours per day were spent in unpaid care work. Womencontributed to over three-fourths (76.2%) of this total. This unpaid labor is equivalent to 2.0billion people working full-time (40 hours per week) without pay, representing 66.9% of theworld's working-age population. The Indian System of National Accounts (SNA), like othercountries, does not include the value of home-produced services in the national accountsproduction boundary. Especially in the case of an economy like India, where the labor forceparticipation rate of women remains low and most of their work is invisible and unaccountedfor, accounting for those home-produced services and creating extended SNA accounts holdextreme significance. The aim of this article is to estimate the ‘unpaid care work’ (householdservices unaccounted for in SNA) done by men and women both in time units and thenmonetise it to compute the economic value of this ‘unpaid care work’. Data Sources used forthe study are the Time Use Survey 2019 and the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2019-20. Themethodology followed in the creation of NTTA in this study was developed by GretchenDonehower. Results show that men specialize in paid work, whereas women specialize inunpaid care work. Leisure and education seem to show very little gender variation in timeuse. There is a huge gender variation in the production age profiles of unpaid care work. Thetotal time spent on indirect care is more than direct care for all ages. It is observed that thetotal time spent on unpaid work peaks from around 25 to 40 years of age for both genders..While men spend significantly less time in indirect care activities than women, withinindirect care activities, men spend more time in ‘do-it-yourself activities’ of improving,maintaining, and repairing own dwelling, personal and household goods, vehicles, pet care,and related activities. On the other hand, cooking is the indirect care activity that takes up themajority of women’s time.The hours spent on direct care is higher for women than men. Timespent in direct care increases rapidly around age 20 and peaks at age 27 by spending around11 hours per week. There is no gender gap observed in consumption of unpaid care work.Calculating the net time transfers of unpaid care work points out that women are net givers ofunpaid care work, and men are net beneficiaries of unpaid care work. To account for thevalue of unpaid care work activities produced in homes, following the methodology proposedby Donehower (2019), by applying the input pricing approach, we find out the value ofunpaid care work by assigning wages to different unpaid care activities. Age profiles ofvarious activities in monetary terms, rescaled using per capita GDP show that all monetaryage profiles take up similar shape of curves as time age profiles. It also reveals that childrenat age 0 consume unpaid care work to level equivalent to 250 percent of per capita GDP. Theprime contributors to household economy is women and at all ages they are the net givers ofunpaid care work. While the results are descriptive, the scope this study puts forward is huge.The accounting for unpaid care work for 2019 is merely the first step to initiating much-focused but more inclusive interventions to approach unpaid care work production and theindividuals involved in it. With revisions in the System of National Accounts, the importanceof accounting of the unpaid household services, and thus creating extended accounts areparamount.