Time Use Survey shows unpaid-care gender gap

MoSPI's survey measuring how Indians split paid and unpaid work across a 24-hour day — and what it reveals about who carries the household.

What happened

• The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) placed the findings of the Time Use Survey (TUS) 2024 before the Lok Sabha, in answer to a parliamentary question.
• The survey was conducted across the full calendar year, January–December 2024, and its report had been released earlier through a PIB press release dated 25 February 2025.
• The survey's stated primary objective is to measure the participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities — that is, to put a number on how a day is actually spent.
• The headline finding is a wide gender gap in unpaid caregiving for household members: in the 15–59 age group, 41% of women participated against 21.4% of men in 2024.
• The same gap shows in time, not just participation: women spent on average about 140 minutes a day on unpaid caregiving versus about 74 minutes for men.
• Both participation rates rose against the previous round (TUS 2019), signalling more reported caregiving overall, with the gender gap persisting.
• The reply was tabled by the Minister of State (Independent Charge), MoSPI and Ministry of Planning, and MoS Ministry of Culture, Rao Inderjit Singh.

Background & context

A Time Use Survey does something a household consumption or employment survey cannot: it accounts for all 1,440 minutes of a person's day and classifies each block of activity — sleeping, paid work, unpaid domestic chores, caregiving, learning, leisure, self-care. Conventional economic statistics count only what is bought, sold, or paid for, so a vast amount of work — cooking, cleaning, fetching water, minding children and the elderly — is rendered statistically invisible because no money changes hands. The TUS is the instrument that makes this unpaid, non-market work visible and measurable, which is why it has become the standard evidence base for questions of gender, the care economy, and the "real" working day.

India's engagement with time-use measurement is not new. The country's first Time Use Survey was a pilot conducted in 1998–99, covering a handful of States. The exercise was then institutionalised: the first nationwide TUS run by the National Statistical Office (NSO) under MoSPI was conducted in 2019, and TUS 2024 is the next full nationwide round. Having two comparable nationwide rounds (2019 and 2024) matters for the exam and for policy, because it converts a one-off snapshot into a trend — we can now say whether the unpaid-care burden is rising, falling, or holding, and whether the gender gap is widening or narrowing.

The survey sits within MoSPI's larger statistical machinery. MoSPI houses the National Statistical Office (NSO), which conducts the country's flagship large-scale surveys — the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for employment and unemployment, the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) for spending and poverty, and the Time Use Survey for the allocation of time. The TUS therefore belongs to the same family of official household surveys, and is frequently confused with them: it is the one that measures time, not income, employment status, or expenditure.

Methodologically, a time-use survey works by asking respondents to reconstruct a full 24-hour reference day in fixed time slots, recording the activity performed in each slot. Because a single day for one person can be unrepresentative, the survey is fielded across the whole calendar year and across a large sample of households, so that seasonal and day-of-week variation averages out — a farmer's day in the sowing season differs from the lean season, and a weekday differs from a weekend. The recorded activities are then mapped onto a standard classification so that India's data can be compared internationally; TUS uses an activity classification aligned with the UN's International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics (ICATUS). ICATUS draws the crucial boundary between activities that fall inside the System of National Accounts production boundary (paid and market work), activities that are productive but unpaid and outside that boundary (own-use household services such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving), and pure non-productive personal activities (sleep, leisure, self-care). It is this boundary that lets a TUS quantify exactly how much unpaid, non-market work an economy runs on.

For Prelims

• Name & conductor: Time Use Survey (TUS) 2024, conducted by MoSPI through the National Statistical Office (NSO).
• Reference period: field work spread over a full year, January–December 2024 (to even out seasonal variation in how time is spent).
• Report release: findings released via PIB press release dated 25 February 2025; restated in the Lok Sabha on 25 March 2026.
• Primary objective: to measure participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities.
• Unpaid caregiving — participation (age 15–59): 41% of women vs 21.4% of men in 2024, up from 32.8% of women and 16.2% of men in TUS 2019.
• Unpaid caregiving — time spent: ~140 min/day for women vs ~74 min/day for men in 2024 (2019: ~137 min women, ~73 min men).
• India's first TUS: a pilot in 1998–99; the first nationwide NSO round was TUS 2019. (curator-added, web-verified)
• Classification framework: TUS uses an activity classification aligned with the UN's International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics (ICATUS). (curator-added, web-verified)
• Nodal chain: Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation → National Statistical Office → field survey → report tabled in Parliament.

What it is NOT: The TUS is not an employment or unemployment survey — that is the PLFS. It is not a consumption or poverty survey — that is the HCES. It does not measure income or wages; it measures how time is allocated across activities. It is also not a Census operation and not a sample registration exercise — it is a sample-based survey of time use. And "unpaid caregiving for household members" is a specific category within it, not the whole of unpaid work (which also includes unpaid domestic chores like cooking and cleaning).

The family it belongs to (MoSPI/NSO flagship surveys): Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) → employment; Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) → spending/poverty; Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) → factory sector; and the Time Use Survey (TUS) → allocation of time. Knowing which survey measures what is the classic "match the pairs" trap.

Why it matters

The problem the survey addresses is the invisibility of unpaid work in the way economies are conventionally measured. National income accounts capture market production but largely exclude unpaid domestic and care work, even though that work is what allows the paid economy to function — somebody has to cook, clean, and raise the next generation of workers. When this labour is invisible in the data, it is invisible in policy: budgets, time-poverty, and the design of welfare schemes all proceed as if the care burden did not exist.

By quantifying the gap, TUS 2024 supplies hard numbers for several live policy debates. The first is female labour-force participation: India's relatively low rate of women in paid work cannot be understood without seeing how much of their day is already absorbed by unpaid caregiving and domestic work. A woman doing ~140 minutes a day of caregiving has that much less time available for paid employment, education, or rest — the survey makes that trade-off measurable. The second is the care economy: the data strengthens the case for public investment in care infrastructure — childcare, crèches, elder-care, Anganwadi services — as a route to freeing women's time. The third is recognition and redistribution: international policy frameworks speak of recognising, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work, and a TUS is the only instrument that can tell whether redistribution is actually happening over time.

The trend reading is sobering. Between 2019 and 2024 the share of people reporting unpaid caregiving rose for both sexes, but the gender gap did not close — women's participation climbed from 32.8% to 41%, men's from 16.2% to 21.4%. The absolute gender gap in participation widened slightly, and the time gap (women doing roughly twice the daily minutes of men) held firm. So the headline is not that the burden is being redistributed; it is that caregiving is being reported more, and women still carry the bulk of it.

For Mains