Indians now spend more time at work than at rest

On average, Indians spent more time on work, entertainment, and unpaid caregiving services in a day in 2024 than in 2019.

- Abhishek Jha

This mostly came at the expense of time they used to spend in 2019 on self-care and maintenance (a broad official term encompassing everything from sleeping to receiving medical care), but they also cut down the time spent on nearly every other category of daily activities.

The trends in daily time use are the summary results of the Time Use Survey (TUS) conducted in January-December 2024 by the National Statistics Office (NSO) across 139,487 households, a factsheet on which was released on Tuesday. The last TUS was conducted in 2019 and was the first such survey.

The summary findings of the 2024 TUS are largely in line with the Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS), which show that the proportion of the population working or looking for a job has increased after the Covid-19 pandemic. However, one will have to wait for unit-level data of the TUS to tease out details of different activities—the factsheet has data for only nine very broad categories—that has contributed the most to the change.