The latest rounds of the periodic labour force surveys show that overall employment, particularly self-employment, among rural women, has increased significantly since 2017-18. Most of these women report being helpers in a home-based enterprise. This increase in women’s time allocated to income generating work begs the question: How and where are women saving time and reallocating that saved time to work?
Women spend a majority of their daily time cooking, as shown by the 2019 Time Use Survey of India. A granular 24-hour time use survey of almost 3,000 primary cooks in households in rural Indore by my co-authors and I finds that of the 60 hours of time spent on domestic work by rural women per week, the majority (more than 40 hours) is spent on cooking and cleaning — almost four hours per day, on average, which is equivalent to a part-time job. Almost 75 per cent of these women use firewood and cow dung for cooking, which not only makes cooking and cleaning more time-consuming, but also exposes these women to cardiovascular and lung disease due to indoor smoke inhalation.
Could the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) programme have increased the home productivity of rural women and reduced the time they spend on cooking and fuel collection? In the same survey, we asked the primary cooks what fuel they used for cooking the last meal along with estimating the time taken to cook that entire meal for the family. Comparing the average time taken by the primary cook to prepare the last meal for the family in households that do not have LPG access (and therefore use solid fuels or the traditional chulha for cooking) versus those households that have LPG access, we find that it takes approximately 30 minutes less time to prepare a meal if LPG is used rather than solid fuels for cooking.
Subsequently, when households with and without LPG connections are matched on similar characteristics (including income), the time use data show lower time spent on fuel collection and fuel making by women in households with LPG access relative to those who do not have an LPG account in rural Indore. There is potentially a large reduction in time spent in dung collection of almost 70 minutes per week, although the time savings in firewood collection are small (about 10 minutes per week). Other domestic work falls by about 20 minutes per day. Hence the daily time saving is at most 30 minutes for these women.
However, we find no increase in time spent by these women on income-generating work (either work for pay or as helpers in household enterprises or self-employment) in households with LPG access. But almost all the daily time saved is reallocated to leisure (about 20 minutes per day). While LPG can indeed improve women’s welfare, why do we not observe an increase in their labour force participation?
First, it is worth noting that fuel collection is an activity undertaken once a week or about four times a month by most rural households. Hence, a shift to LPG does not entail daily time-saving. Second, the 20-30 minutes of daily time-saving from cooking is not sufficient for women to step out of the home and take up a full-time job. Not surprisingly, our analysis suggests that the time saved is reallocated to leisure.
Most importantly, how do we value this time that women are saving daily, of about 30 minutes approximately? In rural areas, paid work available is primarily manual and low skilled with low wages. The potential time saving of about 30 minutes estimated is valued at only about 5 per cent of rural monthly household income, given the rural daily wage for unskilled, manual labour (corresponding to these women’s primary level of education and lack of vocational or technical skills). Access to manufacturing jobs or service-sector jobs, which give you higher returns and increase the opportunity cost of women’s domestic work, is almost absent in most rural areas. Not only is the value of women’s time relatively low, there are very few opportunities for flexible work for women in this context. The average female employment rate in the context is only 15 per cent and primarily in agricultural self-employment. Hence, these households do not have a large enough incentive to save women’s time in cooking and fuel collection by shifting to regular usage of LPG.
While households may have an LPG connection, the usage of LPG continues to be low in rural India. The PMUY programme has undoubtedly been a huge success. However, these households do not use LPG regularly for cooking. They engage in mixed-fuel cooking, as a result of which the usage of LPG cylinder refills is very low. While the maximum usage by a four-member household would be about 12 cylinders, if the only fuel used by the household is LPG, the data shows that the average annual usage is only about three LPG cylinder refills.
Clean cooking technology, either LPG or induction, is unlikely to save large chunks of time in one go to allow women to work full-time and bring in a substantial amount of income to the household. The disincentives for adopting clean technology are heightened by the fact that typically it is men who make decisions about the purchase of LPG refills. Thus, the low bargaining power of these women further binds them to using dirty fuels.
The fact sheet on the 2024 Time Use Survey shows a 1.5 percentage point increase in overall employment and 24 more minutes spent on employment activities by women, relative to 2019. The reasons behind the observed 20 percentage point increase in women’s self-employment between 2017-18 and 2023-24, therefore, remains unresolved.
We await more granular, recent data on women’s time use to better understand how much of the rise in women’s work participation is attributable to methodological changes in the PLFS survey and how much of it is a real, meaningful change in Indian women’s time allocation.
The writer is professor of Economics, ISI Delhi, and head, Digital Platforms and Women’s Economic Empowerment (DPWEE) Programme
