Her hair neatly tied back in a bun, the lipstick bright red on her lips, Usha is talking about a typical day in her life. For the single mother of four, Sunday or Monday makes no difference to her routine: Up before dawn, cook and pack school lunch for the kids, a quick bath and then off to work at the first of the four houses where she cleans and cooks. By 3 pm, she’s done and there’s time enough to buy vegetables and daily provisions on her way back home to eat a late lunch and get the dinner going.
I ask her if the kids chip in with the housework. “This is their time to study,” she says emphatically. “I want them to be able to become something.” The eldest, a girl, is in the 12th standard. Next year, she says, she will be in college. For her daughter, she wants what she couldn’t get, a career with a job in an office where she will be respected.
Aspirational India gives cause for hope. The ASER (annual status of education report) released earlier this year lists the reasons why. Fears that the pandemic would disrupt learning proved to be unfounded. And despite one of the world’s longest school closures, learning outcomes improved measurably. Government schools, at least in rural India, have shown the most improvement with almost every child in school, and girls surging ahead of boys in such skills as ability to read.
Driving a large part of this change is a new generation of mothers who want a better life for their daughters, says Rukmini Banerjee, chief executive officer, Pratham Education Foundation that conducts ASER.
The ASER survey registered a significant drop in unschooled mothers, from 47% to 29% in eight years. These are the unsung heroes heralding and hoping for their daughters to thrive. They now demand higher standards from schools and Anganwadi centers. Women like Usha who dream of their daughters in white collar jobs.
A project called Second Chance, also run by Pratham, is designed to help girls who had dropped out of school to clear their class 10 exams. In classrooms in Jaipur during a visit, I also met several mothers, accompanying their daughters in the hope that they too would clear the board exams.
Afsana Khan who had been pulled out of school 16 years ago while she was still in the eighth grade and married off soon after proudly told me that she had cleared her 10th exams with a first division, 71.83%. “It’s given me a lot of status in the family,” she said.
STICKY CHALLENGES
But if the education of girls is one of India’s great success stories, another survey tells us just how stubbornly resistant some things are to change.
The 2024 Time Use Survey, released this week by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, tells you how different are the lives of Indian men and women.
Men spend their time making money through employment and related activities; an average of 473 minutes for women’s 341.
For Indian women, the priority is housework and care-work, all of which is obviously unpaid. No bonuses, no sick leave, no Sundays off. The gap is not a gap but more accurately a gulf with women spending 289 minutes a day on housework compared to 88 minutes put in by men.
Then there is unpaid care work—looking after children, the elderly, the sick and those with special needs. It’s 137 minutes a day for women and 75 for men.
The implications of this lop-sided arrangement are clear. Because women bear such a disproportionate burden of unpaid housework and care-work, they have little to no time for paid work outside the house. For this to change, it is imperative for men to pick up the slack and make unpaid housework more equitably distributed.
The TUS paints a stark picture of the time poverty that Indian women face, says Kanishka Chatterjee, director, The Nudge Prize. “We must recognize the challenges and opportunities when it comes to women’s economic participation and design work around their realities.” This, according to him includes remote work, a suggestion made recently by Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu.
But if you’re happy to grasp at straws, then know this: Between 2019 and 2024, women managed to shave off 10 whole minutes from unpaid housework. That’s an average of two minutes per year. “This is equivalent to a rounding off error and suggests there is no material change in social norms and the gender distribution of unpaid care work,” says economist Mitali Nikore.
CAUTIONARY TALES
March 8, International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate the wins. But global events of the past few years also serve as a warning.
In Afghanistan, from a ban beyond basic education to voices being heard in public, the Taliban has literally erased the presence of women in public. In Iran, women are imprisoned, beaten and even killed for improperly wearing their hijab. In Iraq it is now legal for nine-year-old girls to marry.
One in three women globally is subjected to violence. But in Argentina, president Javier Milei wants to remove femicide, the murder of a woman by a man in the context of gender violence, from the penal code where it has been punishable by life imprisonment since 2012. And in Donald Trump’s America, abortion rights guaranteed 50 years ago have been rolled back. In some states abortions for pregnancies by incest or those that threaten the life of the mother are banned.
In India, one of women’s biggest threats to agency stem from laws that effectively ban interfaith relationships in as many as 10 states. Earlier this week, an interfaith couple from Jharkhand who had run off to Kerala in order to marry had to seek high court protection against their family.
Majoritarian ideas are now endorsed by the state. The country’s first uniform civil code since Independence passed by Uttarakhand has a peculiar clause requiring cohabiting couples to register their “live-in” relationship with the government. It is an invasion of privacy that affects the right of individuals and leads to surveillance by the state, advocate Vrinda Grover told the Uttarakhand high court earlier this week.
Women and girls continue to face horrific crimes and violence. This week’s headlines include a five-year-old baby battling for her life in the ICU after being raped by a 17-year-old juvenile. In Pune, a woman asks for help in locating her bus at a bus-stand and is raped by a man who calls her his “sister”. It takes a massive three-day manhunt before he is arrested.
And, yet despite the gloom, there is cause for cheer to be found in the pockets of resistance. In unionized and ‘progressive’ Kerala ASHA workers have been on strike for close to three weeks over pending payments and better renumeration.
Earlier this week, justice BV Nagarathna, slated to be India’s first woman chief justice, spoke up in the Supreme Court when she set aside the dismissal of two women judicial officers in Madhya Pradesh noting that one of them had suffered a miscarriage and was in extreme pain. Ruled Nagarathna: “It is not enough to find comfort solely in the growing number of female judicial officers if we are unable to ensure for them a sensitive work environment and guidance.”
This article was originally published on March 2 2025 by the Hindustan Times