WHO COOKED YOUR DINNER? A NEW RECIPE FOR GENDER SENSITIVE GROWTH: INDIA'S NEW LABOUR CODES HOLD KEY

Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? The provocative question, once aimed at the Father of Modern Economics, echoes with particular resonance in India.

- DR AAKASH DEV

The book is a critique of Smith's ‘Invisible Hand’ postulation and challenges the very foundation of economic measurement, pointing to the vast, uncounted economy of unpaid labour, performed predominantly by women, that fuels the official, market-based one. The Indian women are no different, cooking, cleaning, and caring so that others could participate in the paid economy, but find their contributions relegated to a mere footnote in the nation's growth story.

There was some food for thought during a recent training programme on ‘Gender and Labour Laws’, organised by VV Giri National Labour Institute, Ministry of Labour and Employment, which sought to address the larger questions on the intersection of paid work and unpaid care work and relevance of social reproduction in labour laws.

Let's first make sense of some data. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), women’s labour force participation rose to 41.7% in 2023-24, a notable increase from earlier years. Yet this remains far below men’s participation and skewed towards low-paying self-employment and unpaid family work. Meanwhile, India’s Time Use evidence shows that women aged 15-59 years spent about 305 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services in 2024, only slightly down from 315 minutes in 2019. It reflects massive economic inefficiency, a leakage of productive potential that the economy misses out on. In a recent paper with Ratna Sahay at NCAER, we show that a more equitable sharing of household responsibilities between men and women, together with greater flexibility in working hours through formal part-time contracts, could raise female labour force participation in India by 6 percentage points percentage points.