India is targeting a $5 trillion economy. Indonesia wants to become the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2045. Both ambitions rest on productive, healthy, and empowered workforces. Yet both growth stories carry a contradiction neither government has faced squarely. Much of the labour that sustains these workforces is performed every day, free of charge, overwhelmingly by women. It does not appear in GDP.
This is not a mere measurement gap. It is a governance failure with consequences for productivity, democratic participation, public health, and social equity. New data from both countries makes it harder to look away.
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Unpaid care work in India
India’s Time Use Survey 2024, released by MoSPI in February 2025, offers the clearest national picture of this imbalance. It covered 4.5 lakh individuals across 1.3 lakh households. Women spend an average of 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work. Men spend 88 minutes. The ratio is more than three to one. Only 25% of women aged 15–59 participated in employment-related activities in 2024, against 75% of men.
The trend beneath the apparent progress matters. Women’s workforce participation rose from 21.8% in 2019 to 25% in 2024. Their participation in caregiving also rose, from 32.7% to 41%. More women are now doing paid work and unpaid care work at the same time. The double burden is not fading. It is getting heavier.
Indonesia shows the same pattern. Women and Men in Indonesia 2024, published by the Central Statistics Agency, shows that women continue to perform most domestic and caregiving work despite gains in education and employment. ILO data found Indonesian women spending more than 100 hours a week on unpaid care work. They also earn, on average, 23% less than men in paid employment.
Education has not closed the gap. Care limits the hours, mobility, and continuity that career advancement requires. Across Asia and the Pacific, the ILO estimates that women perform 80% of unpaid care hours. At the current pace, the region would take about 210 years to close this gap.
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The hidden subsidy to GDP
The strongest economic argument is also the least heard. Unpaid care has monetary scale.
Research published in Economic and Political Weekly in 2024, using replacement cost and opportunity cost methods, estimated unpaid household work in India at 26–36% of GDP in 2022–23. The Ministry of Women and Child Development placed it at 15–17% of GDP in a 2024 submission. A State Bank of India research report valued it at about Rs 22.7 lakh crore, or 7.5% of GDP.
The estimates differ. Their direction does not.
India spends about 0.1% of GDP on childcare services through the Anganwadi network while drawing far larger value from women’s unpaid labour. This is not welfare. It is extraction by default, sustained by cultural norms and made invisible by national accounting.
The aggregate data should not be read as if all women face the same burden. In India, care work is stratified by caste, class, and geography. Dalit and Adivasi women face compounded disadvantages: more unpaid care hours, weaker access to public care infrastructure, and steeper barriers to formal employment. IMPRI research documents their concentration in insecure and hazardous work alongside heavier domestic responsibility. Caste and gender do not act separately here. They multiply each other.
Informal women workers excluded
The informal sector sharpens the contradiction. India’s Maternity Benefit Act, amended in 2017, provides 26 weeks of paid leave. On paper, it is among the most generous provisions in the region. In practice, it excludes most women workers.
IndiaSpend’s analysis of government data shows that 93.5% of women workers cannot access it because the Act applies only to establishments with ten or more employees. More than 85% of women work in smaller units. India’s most visible care policy reaches fewer than one in fifteen working women.
Agricultural labourers, domestic workers, home-based workers, and self-employed women remain outside its protection. These are also the women with the least bargaining power and the highest care burden.
Ageing India and unpaid eldercare
The care gap will not narrow on its own. Demography will widen it.
India’s elderly population is about 153 million. It is projected to reach 347 million by 2050, nearly a fifth of the population. The old-age dependency ratio, now around 16%, is projected to rise to 30% by mid-century. As joint families shrink, nuclear households grow, and migration separates adult children from ageing parents, eldercare will fall on fewer people. Mostly women.
Women already constitute 58% of India’s elderly population. More than half are widows. They are both recipients and providers of informal care. India has no formal eldercare system at scale to absorb this pressure. Without investment now, the silver wave will be managed the same way today’s care burden is managed: through women’s unpaid time.
Anganwadi centres and childcare gaps
Both countries have some care infrastructure. India’s Anganwadi network under POSHAN 2.0 has about 13.9 lakh centres. Indonesia has gender mainstreaming programmes and community welfare networks with national reach. But the infrastructure is not designed for the scale or nature of the problem.
India’s Anganwadi centres are half-day nutrition contact points. They are not full-day childcare facilities. A working mother with an eight-to-ten-hour day cannot depend on a centre that closes at noon. Urban coverage is thin. Only seven in every 100 Anganwadi beneficiaries are in urban areas.
The crèche system is weaker still. As of late 2023, only 2,688 of a planned 17,000 crèches under the National Crèche Scheme were operational. Spending under Mission Shakti and Mission Vatsalya has averaged 19–30% below budget allocation. This is not only a resource gap. It is a priority gap.
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Care economy reform
Reform needs more than higher spending. The ILO’s 5R framework — recognise, reduce, redistribute, reward, and represent — offers a useful structure.
Time-use data must become a regular input into economic planning, not an occasional statistical exercise. Parental leave must also become genuinely shared. Sweden’s non-transferable paternity quota helped normalise fathers taking parental leave. India’s paternity leave largely reaches central government employees in the formal sector. Indonesia’s is two days. Without structural incentives for men to provide care, the burden will not redistribute. It will merely be praised as resilience.
India’s gender-responsive budgeting framework, now two decades old, must be deepened. It should evaluate care impacts across major spending decisions. It must also address Dalit, Adivasi, informal sector, and migrant women who fall outside existing schemes.
India’s and Indonesia’s legislators make laws, allocate budgets, and design welfare systems for all citizens. That includes the millions of women whose daily labour sustains families, communities, and economies without recognition or institutional support. The TUS 2024 data has made the scale of this contribution numerically undeniable.
The failure is not only one of intention. It lies in a framework that counts roads and digital infrastructure as investment, but counts women’s care labour as nothing. Making care visible is not a matter of gender justice alone. It is a precondition for the productive, equitable, and democratic economies both countries claim to seek.
Pruthviraj Kamble is a Research Associate at the School of Government, MIT World Peace University, Pune. Shinta Damayanti is a Master of Public Administration student at the University of North Sumatra, Indonesia.