Abstract

This note investigates a few economic features associated with productive and socially reproductive labour hours spent by women who are engaged as self-employed workers in agriculture and allied sectors in rural India. More specifically, we have utilised two rounds of nationally representative Time Use Surveys (NSO TUS 2019 and TUS 2024) to estimate the prevalence of income distress for self-employed women, despite being part of the agricultural workforce. The reason with which self-employed women become crucial to this note follows from the fact that in the last seven years, women’s workforce participation has primarily risen through such forms of employment.
Theoretically this article is broadly located in the domain of Marxist-Feminist discourse on ‘women’s work’ but in contribution it departs from the usual ‘double burden’ or ‘time poverty’ narrative that has been at the core of the discussion. We observe that all self-employed women who are engaged in agriculture, spends nine to ten hours in total, combining both productive labour and socially reproductive labour hours. There is also evidence of eight-nine hours of activities associated with self-care and maintenance (including sleep), thus refuting the fact that the primary contradiction lies in compromised resting hours. Whereas, we observe that the daily levels of consumption do not mitigate the required expenditure to rejuvenate their labour power.
Empirically speaking, between 2019 and 2024, we estimated that a little more than 85% of self-employed women in agriculture in India remain income poor, who are unable to maintain the required levels of consumption (i.e., their earnings are less than $1.9 per capita per day). It is in this context that we suggest that the existing frameworks within feminist discourse that understand ‘time poverty’ as a phenomenon where required ‘rest and self-care hours are compromised’ (in shorter and longer terms of capitalist development) fall short in explaining the qualitative aspects associated with the working conditions in both productive and socially reproductive labour spheres. More importantly, if the overall economy faces a downturn, we offer an alternative proposition: in an already distressed rural economy, work remains non-remunerative, especially for women (but not restricted to women only).
With meagre remunerative hours in the productive sphere and material conditions that do not improve the drudgeries of socially reproductive labour hours, they continue to reproduce a specific kind of ‘income poverty’, which is induced by the ‘time’ spent in production and yet not ‘rewarded’, or we have termed it as ‘Time Induced Income Poverty’.