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.
Reimagining schemes
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).
Women’s workforce participation also remains constrained because childcare services are fragmented, under-resourced, and misaligned with women’s working hours. At present, Palna creches, Anganwadis, and POSHAN schemes operate in silos, often duplicating infrastructure while leaving gaps in coverage.
Learning from models such as Karnataka’s ‘Koosina Mane’, the gender budget could pool allocations for creches, Anganwadis, and nutrition under a ‘Care Infrastructure Convergence Window’, and mandate reporting outcomes in women’s time saved and hours of care redistributed, not just meals served or centres opened.
Redesigning schemes
Second, tie allocations to time-measured outcomes. While the gender budget has expanded steadily and accounted for a record 8.9% of total Union Budget allocations or 1% of GDP, more than 75% of all allocations in 2025-26 fall under Part B (30-99% gender specific) and Part C (below 30%), indicating that gender concerns have been integrated across general schemes.
However, very often, portions of existing schemes are re-labelled as gender-responsive; they are not redesigned to address women’s specific barriers. Therefore, ministries must be encouraged to think through the gender components of schemes before demanding allocations under the gender budget.
Agriculture illustrates this disconnect starkly. Despite employing the largest share of women workers, many as unpaid family labour, the sector received only about 4.2% of the gender budget flows.
A large part of this is allocated to the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme, which, when evaluated, shows that it primarily benefits landowners who are predominantly male, and does not move women out of unpaid labour.
Labour force participation
Third, generate demand for women’s labour to productively utilise their time. Gender budgeting must be embedded within employment-generation strategies. The newly launched Employment-Linked Incentive scheme, designed to generate more than 3.5 crore jobs in two years, must include a gender budget allocation and set an ambitious goal of ensuring at least 50% of the new jobs are created for women.
The allocated funds could be used for creating additional incentives for enterprises hiring women, like direct wage subsidies and higher social security support.
For rural areas, MGNREGA, now rebranded as VB-GRAM G, must receive renewed funding priority as women comprise over 50% of the beneficiaries.
With VB–GRAM G proposing to expand guaranteed employment from 100 to 125 days, in addition to women-friendly features including work close to home and childcare facilities, increased funding and a continued gender focus (maintaining the nearly 50% gender budget allocation) would address both demand and supply constraints on women’s time.
Women entrepreneurship
Fourth, enable women to scale businesses. Women’s entrepreneurship — a pathway for women to build wealth while having time flexibility — remains underfunded, with MSME allocations for women accounting for just 0.9% of the budget. Women own nearly 60% of India’s unincorporated manufacturing enterprises, but only 4% of these enterprises are registered, and most of them are largely small, own-account enterprises concentrated in segments such as tailoring.
One way out is to give women access to a larger pool of funds — while 64% of Mudra loan accounts and 42% of disbursements are for women, they are overwhelmingly concentrated in Shishu loans (below ₹50,000) that are insufficient for building large-scale businesses.
What is also needed is financial, digital, and technological enablement to help expand market access, skilling beyond traditional sectors, and supporting public infrastructure for safety, mobility and childcare. Relevant ministries should therefore introduce dedicated gender budget provisions to support scaling-up and transitioning into formal, growth-oriented businesses, as seen in several successful women-led textile firms.
Upskilling women
Fifth, prepare women for a digital and AI-driven future of work. A rapidly changing world of work shaped by artificial intelligence calls for targeted interventions to strengthen women’s access to skill development and entrepreneurship by earmarking resources specifically for women, including AI-driven training and grants for mentorship programmes.
The ₹660 crore gender allocation under the India AI Mission in 2025 — 33% of the total programme allocation — signals intent to include women in India’s AI push. However, this commitment must deepen. Investments are needed in women-focused digital skilling, gender-sensitive algorithm designs, and AI-enabled gender programmes. Time-based metrics must ensure that upskilling replaces drudgery rather than adding to it.
Last, the ‘Nari Shakti’ narrative of the Budget must not be built on how much is spent in women’s name, but on the extent to which women’s time is freed, valued, and translated into agency, income, and opportunity.
Tanu M. Goyal is a Senior Fellow at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. Sharavni Prakash and Anjhana Ramesh are researchers with ICRIER’s EPWD (Economic Policies for Women Led Development) Programme.
