India’s care economy, often referred to as the purple economy, represents one of the largest but least acknowledged sectors within its socio-economic landscape. The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines the 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 over-represented in caring roles such as nurses, domestic workers, personal care workers, teachers and child-care assistants, as well as in unpaid care work, including domestic services, care (child, elderly, sick) and community/voluntary services.
While unpaid care work forms the basis of household and community well-being i.e. in maintaining families, enabling labor market participation of others and supporting public services, it is systematically excluded from formal economic calculations and policy priorities. Once unpaid domestic and care work is factored in, women around the world work longer hours than men. The recent World Inequality Report 2026 highlights persistent gender inequality in working hours and labor 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 inequality has become even deeper. Women shoulder 84% of unpaid care time, the value of work is 15 to 17% of GDP, while public spending on care infrastructure is less than 1%. India’s 2024 Time Use Survey tells a similar story. Women aged 15 to 59 spend 305 minutes a day doing unpaid household work, while men spend 88 minutes. And its impact is clearly visible as female labor force participation is only 33.7% compared to 77% for men.
The scale of this invisibility is huge. India is undergoing demographic changes, including an aging population and increasing urbanization, which is driving increasing demand for care services. In rural areas, the drudgery of fetching water and fuel marginalises women, preventing them from getting the time they need for education or paid work. And moreover, in times of crisis, the burden increases, for example, during COVID-19, the demand for care increased, especially for the older generation and even schools closed, forcing women out of their jobs, juggling these responsibilities in endless shifts.
It is important to understand that division of labor is not a biological imperative but a socially constructed structure. For policy analysts, understanding the public economy is not a separate entity but is driven by this hidden engine of the division of labor and is key to removing barriers to women’s economic participation. Historically, classical sociologists have linked gender roles to biological traits. However, feminist critiques revealed that this division is socially constructed and a mechanism of power.
According to recent estimates, women account for 84% of the total time spent on unpaid care activities in India, with responsibilities ranging from caring for children and the elderly to cooking, cleaning and managing household needs. Despite its indispensable nature, this labor is not included in GDP statistics, nor is it compensated, supported, or socially recognized. In fact, the Ministry of Women and Child Development reported in March 2024 that the economic value of women’s unpaid domestic and care work is between 15% and 17% of GDP, equal to or even higher than key sectors such as manufacturing or trade.
In the early 2000s, domestic satellite accounts were issued in an attempt to bring unpaid domestic activities into the margins of national accounts. State policies also tackle unpaid care work through entitlements such as maternity and child care services through schemes such as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), and Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana (IGMSY). The first time-use survey was a pilot study conducted by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO) in 1998–1999 and the first all-India time-use survey was conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO) in 2019 and again in 2024. The empirical data in these surveys presents a clear picture of the extreme gender division of labor within Indian households. As the chart below shows, women still bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic and care work.
Women still do far more unpaid work and have only modest gains in paid working time – from 56 minutes in 2019 to 62 minutes in 2024. In contrast, men devoted almost four times more time than women to paid activities (251 minutes vs. 62 minutes in 2024), which clearly reflects the time exchange that women endure through their caregiving duties. Furthermore, TUS data also indicates that this burden is greater for women in rural and poor communities, where they spend additional time on unpaid work due to limited access to minimum infrastructure such as water, fuel, energy and sanitation. Girls and older women, especially those from poor households, often bear a disproportionate burden at the expense of education and welfare.
The numbers above suggest that care has been feminized and devalued. This systemic time poverty threshold is much higher than wages; This leads to deep psychological and social degradation that compromises national human capital. First, women face a severe “motherhood pay penalty.” The choice to work informally or part-time to manage care is often a forced response to the lack of public care infrastructure. Second, the double burden creates a state of constant exhaustion, which is even more intense than an eight-hour paid job. Psychologically, women are trapped in a double bind. Society rewards goodness and nurturing, yet uses these same qualities to exclude women from leadership roles. And third, when caregiving is seen as solely a female responsibility, it locks families into poverty. Girls often drop out of school to help with difficult tasks, ensuring that the next generation remains equally marginalised.
Aligning economic growth with social justice and gender equality requires a transformative policy response. The ILO’s 5Rs framework—recognize, reduce, redistribute, reward and represent—provides actionable policy recommendations.
First, India must adopt an approach that helps bring the invisible into visibility and ensure that the economic value of care is ultimately recognized. Second, while progress has been made by providing for 26 weeks of maternity leave, it is important to adopt gender-neutral paternity leave to promote redistribution of care responsibilities. Third, large-scale public and private investment is needed to provide accessible and quality care infrastructure and services, thereby ensuring the redistribution of care from families to collective provision. Investing in crèches close to workplaces with qualified staff and long working hours not only reduces women’s time poverty but also creates new jobs. Investing in infrastructure such as water, energy and transportation reduces the hard work and time effort involved in unpaid care. The government may increase financial assistance to provide care services under Mission Shakti.
Fourth, policies can ensure regularization of the care sector and decent working conditions for care workers. According to ILO Convention No. 189 on Domestic Workers, Anganwadi workers and domestic workers should be formally recognized with minimum wages and working hours. Finally, educational curricula need to be updated to disseminate balanced views of care work and encourage gender-neutral advertising in the media.
India’s economic success story, marked by rising GDP, technological innovation and infrastructure expansion, is, in many ways, quietly supported by the invisible labor of millions of women engaged in unpaid care work. This invisible economy, while vital to maintaining a productive economy, remains absent from national accounting systems, macroeconomic policy and even mainstream discourse.
Recognizing, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work is not just a feminist imperative – it is an economic necessity and a moral obligation. This is fully aligned 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 labor are valued in economic models; Investing strongly in care infrastructure such as anganwadis, community health centres, day-care facilities and elderly care homes. Governments, employers and communities must work together to create enabling conditions to liberate women from the burden and make care a collective social function.
This article is written by Chhavi Vashishtha, Associate Fellow, Chintan Research Foundation, New Delhi.
