Executive Summary

The key question of this study is to ask: what does it take to reproduce a household in urban India? Using a series of time-use surveys, we measure the time taken for 33 different tasks within activity clusters such as domestic services (cleaning, food preparation, procurement, upkeep) and caregiving services (child care and elderly care). Within this, we assess both unpaid work done by members of the household and paid work done by an externally engaged domestic worker. We do so across 9,636 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities– Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, religion, neighbourhood type and across households with and without women working for wages.