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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, rebuilt whenever the data are refreshed. Data vintage 2026-10-10. Cite as Raman, V.S., Some Perspective: India's Political Economy, 2004-2026, someperspective.info, CC BY 4.0.