Working 24x7: The NSSO wants to quantify homemakers' work but only by 'cooking' and 'washing'
How much have we actually changed?
Why aren’t there enough women in the workforce of India?
Because they are washing and cooking, the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) might just have solved the puzzle with this sweeping answer.
It is indeed a welcome move that after years of deliberations, there will be a survey to map the amount of unpaid labour the homemakers of the country are putting in. But the NSSO can’t actually generalise household work within the bracket of 'cooking and washing', as that would do a disservice to the 24X7 workforce the NSSO itself is set to recognise.
At the same time, such a generalisation would send an extremely incorrect message about the intricate process that a time-use (how people use their time) survey adopts.
According to reports, the NSSO is planning to start a year-long exercise in January to survey households on how the members who are not directly contributing to the GDP spend their time. The report will be out in 2020.
“We will be able to understand how much time is spent in cooking and washing,” the director general of the NSSO, Debi Prasad Mondal, said, explaining how the data would explain why 700 million Indians are not part of the workforce.
We can only hope that the NSSO used the term ‘cooking and washing’ as an umbrella term to denote all the household chores that an Indian woman is supposed to carry out, and he did not actually mean cooking and washing in particular.
Otherwise, a time-use survey, which reports data on how people spend their time, will be of no use, as cooking and washing are not the only tasks women do at home. These two are not even the tip of the '24x7' iceberg.
For example, if you actually add two hours of cooking and an hour of washing, then better not to take up the initiative at all, because that does not explain why a woman can't join the workforce outside.
The NSSO has also cited some strange explanations of why such a survey was not taken up before.
“We didn’t do time-use survey earlier because the need of the country was different. Mostly developed countries have this because people are more concerned about employment,” the NSSO director general said.
Clearly, employment was not among our concerns, according to the official, while in reality the ministries have actually been working for a long time to start a time-use survey to map the unpaid labour. Such a sweeping comment coming from an office which is supposed to only conduct sample surveys, not make any policy, is quite disturbing.
But more disturbing is what we have at hand.
The mindset which wants to honour unpaid labour but likes to throw everything a woman does into a laundry bag called ‘washing and cooking’.
Not as simple as that
According to reports, it is not actually knocking on the doors and taking down the number of hours women spend cooking and washing.
The process of a time-use survey is complex.
Field workers will ask women about up to three activities for each half-hour interval.
Then the respondents will be asked to identify the major activity of three. For each major activity, there will be additional questions.
Breaking it down: How is a time-use survey supposed to help?
According to NSSO data, women’s national labour force participation (LFP) was only 33 per cent in 2012. It was 53 per cent during 2004-2005.
So where did all these women go?
What are they doing throughout the day?
They may be ‘non-earners’, but they are not ‘non-workers’. They must be so caught up with household chores, which may include cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, taking care of children and other family members, or pets, and so many things more, that they do not have time to go out and earn. Procuring fuel, water can also be there.
Thus, these women are actually saving a lot of money, which goes unrecorded. Tracking down these unpaid jobs can actually help employment data and policy implementation.
During 1998-99, a time-use survey was taken up in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya. It was found that women spent about twice as much time compared to men in taking care of family members. Married and widowed women spent greater time in these activities than unmarried or divorced women. Interestingly, education had little correlation with time use in these areas.
We are on the right track to recognise the silent workforce relentlessly working behind the not-so-silent workforce of the country.
But, if we think cooking and washing are the major works pushing the minute-to-minute contribution of this indispensable workforce into darkness, how much have we actually changed?