The latest rounds of the periodic labour force surveys show that overall employment, particularly self-employment, among rural women, has increased significantly since 2017-18. Most of these women report being helpers in a home-based enterprise. This increase in women’s time allocated to income generating work begs the question: How and where are women saving time and reallocating that saved time to work?

Women spend a majority of their daily time cooking, as shown by the 2019 Time Use Survey of India. A granular 24-hour time use survey of almost 3,000 primary cooks in households in rural Indore by my co-authors and I finds that of the 60 hours of time spent on domestic work by rural women per week, the majority (more than 40 hours) is spent on cooking and cleaning — almost four hours per day, on average, which is equivalent to a part-time job. Almost 75 per cent of these women use firewood and cow dung for cooking, which not only makes cooking and cleaning more time-consuming, but also exposes these women to cardiovascular and lung disease due to indoor smoke inhalation.

Could the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) programme have increased the home productivity of rural women and reduced the time they spend on cooking and fuel collection? In the same survey, we asked the primary cooks what fuel they used for cooking the last meal along with estimating the time taken to cook that entire meal for the family. Comparing the average time taken by the primary cook to prepare the last meal for the family in........

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