Gender balance between Routine and Non-Routine Unpaid Domestic Work in India: Assessing progress towards Sustainable Development Goal-5

Target 5.4 of Sustainable Development Goal 5 aims to value unpaid care and promote shared domestic responsibilities, enabling full participation of women in economic, political, and public arenas. This study examines the allocation of unpaid domestic work within households in India, focusing on who spends time on what type of activity. Utilizing the Time Use Survey 2024, it employs ordinary least square regression to identify socio-economic and demographic factors influencing unpaid routine and non-routine work. The findings reveal a gender disparity in domestic work, with women disproportionately burdened by intensive and inflexible routine tasks. The time spent on unpaid routine work is comparatively higher for women who are in the age group of 30-45 years, resided in rural areas, from nuclear households, married, educated, belong to higher social status groups, from upper income households and not in labour force. This skewed distribution underscores the need to recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid domestic work to achieve equitable and sustainable development through changes in social policies, employment structure of the economy, behavioural, and cultural expectations among individuals as well as in the society.