In 1993, the definition of economic activity in the System of National Accounts (SNA) was extended to include unpaid work. The definition thus covered unpaid operations in agricultural production, along with the collection of firewood and fodder, fetching water, etc., whether for sale or self-consumption. However, unpaid services, such as household maintenance, cooking, care of children and the sick and elderly, and involvement in local and informal groups, organisations and civic responsibilities, were left out of the ambit of SNA. It was only in 2008 that these services were identified as “extended SNA,” and separated from unproductive “non SNA” activities such as sleeping, eating and socialising.

The recognition of care or household maintenance-related activities as extended SNA is a breakthrough for economics. The omission of these activities not only represents a rejection of the gendered nature of care work, but also a failure to recognise the relationship between the amount of time spent on SNA and non SNA work. A woman who spends a greater proportion of the day doing domestic chores and care work is bound to have less time to spend in SNA work. As domestic work cannot easily be quantified in monetary terms, a time-use survey can demonstrate, in terms of hours, the time spent on different SNA, extended SNA and non-SNA activities.

In October 2017, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies conducted a time-use survey among 22 women in the village of Alabujanahalli in Mandya district, Karnataka State. The women were between the ages of 21 and 65, and belonged to different socio-economic classes. This note discusses some findings of the survey, focussing on the time spent on extended SNA activities.

We consider the standard work-week to be 40 hours. Our finding was that 7 women worked at SNA activity for 43 to 76 hours in the week, that is, for an average of 8 to 11 hours a day for 7 days a week. If the time spent on SNA and extended SNA hours were added, 18 women worked between 50 and 100 hours a week, with 9 women working for more than 80 hours a week.

Nine women also spent over 40 hours a week on extended SNA activity alone.

In Figure 1, we plot the hours spent by the 22 women on SNA and extended SNA activity. The bar chart illustrates a negative relation between time spent in SNA and extended SNA activities.

Let me illustrate.

LD is a 45-year-old female head of household whose son, who has a salaried job, supports her. During the reference week, she spent 12 hours a day (84 hours a week) on extended SNA activity. She spent most of that time on cooking and household maintenance (3.5 and 4 hours a day respectively). Although the household has an ownership holding of agricultural land, the holding has been left fallow for the last two years. LD resumed cultivation on this land holding at the time our survey was in progress. It would be interesting to find out, in the next round of this survey, whether the time spent by LD on extended SNA fell after agricultural work on this holding began.

NM (45) is from a manual worker family. She is employed as a domestic employee and also labours out on agricultural operations such as rice transplanting and making seedling bundles. She spent around 38 hours a week, or 6 hours a day, in such SNA activities. However, she also spent 6 hours a day on extended SNA tasks. There were two major features of the time she spent on extended SNA activities during the reference week. First, she spent over 20 hours in cooking for community celebrations (it was a festival time). Secondly, NM is the head of a piece-rate workers’ group. Landlords contact her to employ workers on their land, and hand over the total wage to her, which she then distributes among the workers. She spent 95 minutes at this task during the reference week. On an average, she spent 3 hours a day on these two activities and 2 hours a day on domestic chores in her own home.

Figure 2 illustrates the average time spent on different extended SNA activities by the 22 women. Cooking (44 per cent) and household maintenance (34 per cent) are the two main components of time spent on extended SNA activity. Childcare accounts for around 10 per cent of total time on extended SNA activity.

Notes: (i) HH = household maintenance, which includes sweeping or mopping the homestead area, washing clothes and vessels and planning or supervising household management.
(ii) “Others” includes participation in local and informal groups, organisations and civic responsibilities, and informal help to other households.

C is a 28-year-old married woman with no schooling. She belongs to an income-poor manual worker household with little asset ownership. C’s son is a person with physical disabilities, and C spends a total of 67 hours a week, or about 9 hours a day at extended SNA activity. The household does not have a toilet within the homestead. Consequently, she has to take her son to a place outdoors to defecate. She takes him out twice a day, 20 minutes each time. She also goes to his school for about 30 minutes at lunchtime every day to feed him. She spends a little over an hour in bathing him, while cooking and household maintenance take up to 3 and 4 hours respectively. She is fully occupied by care work to the extent of having almost entirely withdrawn from SNA (4 hours a week). Her principal SNA activity was fetching water, a task on which she spent a little over 3 hours.

D is a 25-year-old woman from a peasant household. She has completed 9 years of schooling. She has been married for 5 years, and spends her day in cooking and care work. D spends 4.5 hours in cooking every day. She has to serve food to her her ailing father-in-law three to four times a day, which takes 15 minutes every time, or a minimum of 45 minutes per day. In total, she spends 57 hours a week (8 hours a day) on extended SNA activity.

Noticeably, when C and D assume responsibility for domestic work or caring for others in the family, they free their husbands (the “breadwinners”) from such tasks, allowing them in turn to engage in “economic” activity. By failing to recognize their ‘extended SNA’ work as economic activity, the System of National Accounts denies these women the status of persons engaged in economic activity. In the words of the economist Nancy Folbre, “How ironic that the measure we call Gross Domestic Product excludes the value of most domestic work!”