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GDP counts the rent on your flat, not 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 women aged 15-59 who do unpaid domestic work spending 289 minutes a day on it in 2024, against 88 minutes for men. 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 36% of GDP, the spread coming from the price put on an hour rather than from any doubt about the hours.

The production boundary is a convention. India collects the hours needed to price what falls outside it and does not do so.

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About this reading

This is one of 37 standing analyses drawn from the Some Perspective dataset. It is not dated commentary: it describes a relationship in the data that holds across the series, and it is regenerated whenever the underlying dataset is refreshed. The figures quoted here reflect the 2026-08-15 data vintage.

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Raman, V.S. Some Perspective: India's Economic Transformation. someperspective.info · CC BY 4.0 · data vintage 2026-08-15. Cite & download · All analyses