Expectations from a gender lens in Budget 2026-27

What the Budget could do to unlock women’s time, productivity, and participation in India’s growth story

As India prepares for Budget 2026-27, it must confront a fundamental, yet persistently ignored, constraint on growth: women’s time poverty. Women contribute only about 18% to India’s GDP, not because they work less, but because a large share of their labour remains unpaid and uncounted in national income. About 40% of India’s women are now in the labour force, largely concentrated in unpaid agricultural work, but 60% of women who are out of the labour force cite domestic and care responsibilities as the reason (Periodic Labour Force Survey data).

This is the result of a combination of supply-and-demand side constraints — care burdens, limited skills, mobility barriers, and restrictive social norms and limited creation of decent jobs to absorb women’s time remuneratively. It is important, therefore, to explicitly value, free up, and productively redistribute women’s time. The Union Budget, particularly the gender budget, is a powerful instrument to enable this outcome.

We outline five key outcomes that Budget 2026-27 could do to unlock women’s time, productivity, and participation in India’s growth story. First, invest where women’s time is truly lost. The Time Use Survey (2025) shows that the time women spent on unpaid care and domestic work increased marginally from 364 minutes per day in 2019 to 366 minutes in 2024, despite an increase in the time spent on paid work from 68 to 76 minutes, implying an overall increase in working hours, both paid and unpaid.

This underscores the need to evaluate and reimagine welfare and social schemes, which dominate gender budgets, by embedding time-use metrics into them.

Take, for instance, the large-scale Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), which is seen as women-empowering with a significant gender budget, because homes are registered in women’s names. But to shift housing from a static asset to a time-saving enabler for women, the scheme must count a ‘gender-complete house’ as the unit of budgeting and reporting — fitted with time-saving infrastructure, including piped drinking water, electricity supply, functional toilets, and clean cooking energy.

There are existing initiatives, but they require greater coordination with a gender lens. The upcoming Budget could mandate automatic convergence of PMAY with schemes such as Jal Jeevan Mission (drinking water), Swachh Bharat Mission (sanitation), rooftop solar (electricity), and Ujjwala (clean cooking).