On 1st February 2026, the Finance Minister tabled the Union Budget 2026-27 along with the Gender Budget Statement (GBS). The GBS recorded its highest-ever allocation at ₹5,00,878.73 crore in FY27, with its share in total expenditure rising to 9.36%. Institutional coverage also widened, with the number of Ministries, Departments & UTs reporting gender-related allocations increasing to 58, indicating deeper mainstreaming of gender-responsive budgeting, alongside an emerging emphasis on care-related schemes. This comes on the back of three successive Economic Surveys (2023–24, 2024–25, 2025–26) that have foregrounded care infrastructure as central to women’s empowerment.
Globally, the 5R framework (Recognise, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work, and reward and represent paid care work) has increasingly emerged as the cornerstone for addressing women’s unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW) burdens.
Early last year, India released its Time Use Survey 2024, offering a sobering snapshot of how men and women spend their time. While participation in employment and related activities increased between 2019 and 2024 for both women and men, women’s participation in unpaid domestic services remains nearly three times that of men, and their participation in unpaid caregiving is around twice as high. As a result, women spend close to 4.7 hours each day on unpaid domestic and caregiving work, despite modest employment gains. In India, both the Budget emphasis and Time Use Surveys mark an important step towards recognising unpaid care work. However, recognition alone is insufficient. Reducing care burdens is equally critical, particularly in Global South contexts such as India, where UCDW extends beyond household caregiving to include water and fuel collection, cooking, cleaning, and work on family farms.
Against this backdrop, the GBS 2026–27 reflects a renewed focus on infrastructure-led reduction of UCDW. Swachh Bharat Mission–Gramin, reported under Component B, received a FY27 BE allocation of INR 2,959.58 crore, marginally higher than INR 2,904.36 crore in FY26 BE, reinforcing sanitation access as a time-saving intervention. More significantly, the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) saw a substantial scale-up, with allocations rising by 61.27% from INR 20,476 crore in FY26 BE to INR 33,022.96 crore in FY27 BE. Since August 2019, JJM coverage has expanded from 3.23 crore households (17%) at launch to 15.74 crore households (81.31%) by 20 November 2025. Evidence from SBI Research and the World Health Organisation underscores the gendered gains from this expansion, including reductions in women’s time spent fetching water, increased participation in agricultural and allied activities, and aggregate daily time savings exceeding 5.5 crore hours. In parallel, allocations for LPG connections to poor households under Component A recorded a BE-to-BE increase, signalling an emphasis on clean cooking as a mechanism to reduce women’s time poverty and health risks.
Complementing this, the Budget also signals a more tentative shift towards care redistribution. Under Mission Shakti, the Samarthya component recorded a modest increase, maintaining continuity rather than marking a major scale-up. Within this, the Outcome Budget outlines the expansion of institutional childcare under the Palna sub-component through 1,000 functional Anganwadi-cum-Crèches, supporting approximately 20,000 children aged 6 months to 6 years. These measures have the potential to shift childcare responsibilities from households to the State. Similarly, announcements to expand allied health professionals and caregiver training, especially in the geriatric care sector—backed by a phased outlay of ₹980 crore over three years—indicate an emerging recognition of care needs associated with demographic ageing. These steps suggest a gradual broadening of India’s care policy: from easing household burdens to also opening pathways for more formalised, remunerated care work. Collectively, the investments can also speak to the ‘reward’ principle by expanding paid care roles—most visibly through institutional childcare and the growing emphasis on trained caregivers. For frontline workers such as ASHA and Anganwadi workers, this expansion potentially increases the scale and scope of paid care work; however, questions around wages, employment security, and formal recognition remain unresolved.
At the sub-national level, the reward principle is increasingly articulated through the expansion of Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) targeted at women. But whether UCTs operate as rewards for care or as income substitutes is contingent on context. For UCTs to operate as rewards, the infrastructure and service deficits that intensify women’s care burdens must first be addressed. In practice, many UCTs act as income support for women’s exit from paid work, with PLFS data showing that nearly 49% of women remain outside the labour force due to domestic and care responsibilities shaped by gendered norms. In such contexts, cash transfers risk stabilising women’s exclusion from paid work instead of transforming the organisation of care. Where care-reducing infrastructure and care-redistributing services remain limited in scale, UCTs may ease short-term consumption pressures without altering underlying time-use inequalities. On their own, UCTs cannot elevate unpaid care work; only when embedded within broader investments in care can they begin to shift entrenched time-use inequalities.
Taken together, Budget 2026–27 and recent policy interventions mark meaningful progress on recognising, reducing, redistributing, and even rewarding unpaid care and domestic work. But enabling women’s economic participation—the central objective of addressing unpaid care—cannot rest on fiscal outlays alone. Representation is the institutional bridge: without women’s participation in policy design and budgeting and equally in leadership and changemaking, care investments risk misaligning with the scale and value of their work. Operationalising the fifth R is therefore essential for care investments to translate into sustained gains in women’s economic participation.
About the author(s)
Harshita Kumari is an Analyst at The Quantum Hub. She holds a Master’s in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She lives with an invisible disability and works on social policy issues, with a focus on gender and disability inclusion, and is also engaged in emerging policy areas such as clean energy. Her writing has been published in leading Indian national dailies and details can be found here.
Sonakshi Chaudhary is Associate Director, Policy & Partnerships at The Quantum Hub, with over a decade of experience working across gender, labour, and social protection. Her work spans research, policy advisory, and communications, with a focus on women’s economic empowerment, digital inclusion, and gender-based violence. She has advised government and development partners on translating evidence into policy design and implementation, including contributing to national-level initiatives during her time with the Economic Adviser’s Bureau at the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development. She has also led research and editorial work on India’s female labour force participation, including a podcast examining structural constraints to women’s work. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Mint, Hindustan Times, and Outlook.
