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Social Issues › Poverty, hunger and livelihoods

Care economy

Unpaid care and domestic work, mostly women's, and how the law and the economy count it.

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StandardPrelims and Mains6 Aug 2026

The care economy is the work of looking after people who cannot fully look after themselves: children, the old, the sick and the disabled. Most of it is unpaid and done by women at home; a small part is paid, in crèches, hospitals, old age homes and private households.
The Time Use Survey of 2024, India's second, measures the unpaid part; women's employment participation (ages 15 to 59) rose from 21.8 per cent in 2019 to 25 per cent, while their domestic work fell only from 315 to 305 minutes a day.

Time Use Survey 2024 (persons aged six and above)	Women	Men
Share who did unpaid domestic work on the reference day	81.5 per cent	27.1 per cent
Minutes a day on unpaid domestic work, per participant	289	88
Share who gave unpaid care to household members	34 per cent	17.9 per cent
Minutes a day on unpaid care, per participant	137	75

On 6 August 2026 NITI Aayog released Reimagining Care: Strategies for Empowering Caregivers in Viksit Bharat@2047, its first report on the caregiving workforce. It frames care as a sector to be built, not only a burden to be shared: India's population aged 60 and above was about 149 million in 2022 and is projected to reach 194 million by 2031 and 347 million, a fifth of the population, by 2050.
It proposes a National Caregiving Council, a National Caregiving Qualification Framework for training and certification, a National Caregiver Registry, social security for caregivers, public financing and long term care insurance, support to family caregivers, and overseas placement through training aligned to the curricula of countries that need carers. India has no national count of its paid care workers; the report values the care services market at about $30 billion in 2023, growing to about $72 billion by 2030.
The demand abroad is real but the supply thin: Israel asked for 5,000 home caregivers in May 2024 and 47 had travelled by August 2025.

The Time Use Survey explains the low female labour force participation that every growth model complains of: a woman who gives five hours a day to the house has three fewer hours to sell. Care infrastructure, crèches, elder care, flexible work, is the labour market reform that is also a women's reform.
An ageing India needs a care workforce it does not yet have, and the world's ageing societies will pay for Indian carers if they are trained to a recognised standard; the report is as much an export strategy as a welfare one.
A care policy decides who pays: the family, the State or the market. The report leans to training and markets; the Time Use numbers argue for public provision, since the family already pays in women's hours.

Palna (2022, the crèche component of Mission Shakti's Samarthya vertical, Ministry of Women and Child Development)

Crèches for children aged six months to six years, open to all mothers whether or not they work.
Open 7.5 hours a day on 26 days a month, 25 children a crèche.
Cost shared 60:40 with the States, 90:10 in the North East and hill States.
The target was 17,000 Anganwadi cum crèches in 2024-25, of which 11,395 were approved and 1,761 running by early 2025.

Crèches under the Code on Social Security, 2020 (Ministry of Labour and Employment)

Prelims: Time Use Survey 2024 (MoSPI, second after 2019): women 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work against men's 88; women's employment participation 25 per cent; NITI Aayog's Reimagining Care report of August 2026 and its National Caregiving Council and Qualification Framework; Palna under Mission Shakti.
Mains: how the care economy can be brought into the monetised economy, and whether India should build care as a public service or a trained export workforce.

Show the questions

Mains 2023 GS3: Distinguish between 'care economy' and 'monetized economy'. How can care economy be brought into monetized economy through women empowerment?

Sources

PIB, 25 February 2025
News On AIR, 6 August 2026
NITI Aayog, August 2026, “Reimagining Care: Strategies for Empowering Caregivers in Viksit Bharat@2047”
PIB, 7 April 2025

Settled facts (dates of Acts, constitutional provisions, standing definitions) are from standard references.

'Homemakers and "loss of domestic care"' · on Judicial review and the reach of the courts
Exam lens: the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 and Motor Accident Claims Tribunals; unpaid care work and the Time Use Survey; ₹30,000 a month as the notional minimum.