How does the burden of unpaid care work shape the kinds of jobs Indian women take up? Suggest policy measures to convert participation into decent work.

Unpaid care work means the cooking, cleaning and caregiving done for the household without pay. In India, women carry most of it. They spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services, while men spend 88 [1]. This shortage of free time limits which jobs women can accept. It pushes them into flexible work that is informal and has little security.

How unpaid care shapes women's jobs

• Time poverty: Women also spend 137 minutes a day caring for family members, against 75 for men [1]. Little time is left for salaried jobs with fixed hours and a commute.
• Work close to home: Women take work they can fit around chores, such as the family farm, livestock or home-based piece work. Rural women in crop and animal production rose from 54 million to over 100 million, even as rural men's share in agriculture fell from 54.1% to 47.2% [2]. Agriculture is becoming feminised.
• Unpaid and self-employed work: Nearly two-thirds of the employment added after 2019 was self-employment. Unpaid women family workers made up the largest part of it [3].
• Double burden: Female WPR rose from 22% to 38% between 2017-18 and 2025 [2]. Yet women's caregiving time stayed at 137 minutes between 2019 and 2024 [1]. Counted work was added on top of care work and did not replace it.
• No safety net: Home-based informal work rarely comes with maternity, pension or accident cover.

Policy measures for decent work

• Care infrastructure: Scale up Anganwadi-cum-crèches under Palna (Mission Shakti) near workplaces, and treat childcare as part of employment policy.
• Recognise and redistribute care: Use Time Use Survey data in gender budgeting and encourage shared parental leave.
• Better data: MoSPI should report women in paid work separately from unpaid helpers.
• Social security: Register self-employed women on e-Shram and under the Code on Social Security, 2020.
• Collectives: Grow DAY-NRLM self-help groups into cooperatives so women can bargain together, reach markets and pool risk. The SEWA federation's experience shows how [4]. Link this to Lakhpati Didi for non-farm income.
• Assets: Record women farmers in land records so they can get credit.

Unpaid care is the hidden reason women's growing participation ends up in low-quality work. Shared care, crèches, social protection and collective enterprise can turn being counted as workers into real earnings and choice. That would put into practice SDG 5.4 (recognising and valuing unpaid care work), SDG 8 (decent work), and the Directive Principles in Articles 39(a) and 42.