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GDP counts the rent on your flat and nothing for the cooking
Own the flat you live in and the national accounts estimate a rent for it and add that to GDP. Cook the meal inside it and nothing is added. India's Time Use Survey found that women aged 6 and above who do unpaid domestic work spent 289 minutes a day on it in 2024, against 88 minutes for men (305 minutes for women aged 15-59). At 289 minutes that is about 1,758 hours a year for a woman, in no employment figure and no output series. Published valuations of that work run from 7.5% to 32.4% of GDP, and one reported estimate reaches 36%. The spread comes from the price put on an hour, and there is little doubt about the hours themselves.
What follows. The production boundary is a convention. India collects the hours needed to price what falls outside it and does not do so.
One of 37 readings of the dataset. Data vintage 2026-10-19. Cite as Raman, V.S., Some Perspective: India's Political Economy, 2004-2026, someperspective.info, CC BY 4.0.