Govt turns blind eye to women's household work

In July this year, the Supreme Court expressed outrage at the inclusion of housewives in the same category as prostitutes and prisoners in the Census, calling it a callous approach. The Supreme Court's reaction was in line with the concerns that have been expressed worldwide by researchers, feminists and even policy makers to give some recognition to unpaid care work, usually provided by women.Though unpaid care work and its importance have been recognized, it still remains outside monetized mainstream economies.
Reasons behind the exclusion of this non-productive work is found in the difficulties that are involved in valuing and measuring care services, like taking care of children and cooking. The Central Statistical Organization (CSO) undertook an effort in this direction in 1998. It conducted India's first Time Use Survey (TUS). It was a pilot survey and it covered only six states.
The objective of the survey was to quantify the economic contribution of women to the national economy and to study the gender discrimination in the household activities.
This survey, the first of its kind was conducted fifty years after the birth of independent India in recognition of a recommendation forwarded by UNDP. More than a decade later, it remains the only one.
Neetha N, researcher at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), examines the concept of care work within the context of TUS and concludes that TUS was designed with a very limited and simplistic understanding of care work. But this alone does not explain why in the last ten years, CSO, the technical wing of ministry of statistics did not conduct a more in depth TUS, one encompassing all Indian states.
Perhaps the answer lies in Pronab Sen's response. Sen, principal adviser in the Planning Commission admits, utility of the TUS is not clear. TUS, Sen explains is extremely expensive and it requires round the clock monitoring of the respondents, which in the case of the 1998 survey included 18,591 households, for close to a year. In addition to being expensive, a certain level of superficiality in these surveys is hard to overlook. Neetha N urges that in order to understand care work one needs to go beyond strict activity-based understanding. Then there are other problems like distinguishing between care work and domestic work. Also, something like washing clothes, which is care work, when done by the housewife/mother and economic work when done by a paid hand, brings out the nuances that TUS failed to address.