New Delhi: The unpaid domestic work that women do amounts to about 7.5 per cent of GDP, according to a latest calculation by the State Bank of India’s research team.
According to the SBI’s latest Ecowrap report, released Tuesday, the predominance of women in domestic work — and the fact that they are kept out of conventional economic activities — places their contributions outside the realm of economic production as measured by the government, and also outside the purview of economic policy.
“To understand the status of women in the labour market, it is necessary to comprehend the nature of their unpaid work, which has significant impact on their work participation rate in the economy,” the report said. “Therefore, the objective of our analysis is to examine the magnitude of unpaid domestic work status of women in India.”
The analysis uses data from a National Statistical Survey report for January-December 2019 on the unpaid domestic plus caregiving services provided by women for their household members.
“As per data, the average time (in minutes) spent in a day per participant of age 6 years and above is around 432 minutes (or 7.2 hours),” the SBI report says.
The SBI researchers go on to assume a monthly income of Rs 5,000 for rural women and Rs 8,000 for urban women. In other words, it assumes this is the wage they would have received had they worked for 8 hours a day.
In addition, the researchers assumed that 5 per cent of these women in rural areas and 30 per cent in urban areas are working for wages in the formal set-up, apart from doing their domestic work.
“Our analysis indicates that the total contribution of unpaid women to the economy is around Rs 22.7 lakh crore (rural: Rs 14.7 lakh crore and urban: Rs 8.0 lakh crore) which is almost 7.5 per cent of India’s GDP,” the report said.
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Other efforts to quantify unpaid labour of women
This is not the first attempt at quantifying the unpaid labour of women.
A 2022 report by the Observer Research Foundation used the same data as SBI, but found that “women’s unpaid work is valued at 3.1 per cent of GDP in India”.
The United Nations has said that “unpaid care and domestic work is valued to be 10 and 39 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product and can contribute more to the economy than the manufacturing, commerce or transportation sectors”, although this analysis was not restricted to just India.
Other reports peg the quantum of unpaid domestic work done by women as high as nearly 40 per cent.
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