Authors: Anjali Arya, Ashish Kumar Swain, Suyashee Shukla, Sakshi Soni

INTRODUCTION

From 2019 to 2024, the Government of India has spent more than ₹3.6 lakh crore on six flagship rural infrastructure programs: Jal Jeevan Mission (Piped Water), Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen (Sanitation), PM Ujjwala Yojana (Clean Cooking Fuel), Saubhagya (Electrification), PMAY-Grameen (Housing), and PMGSY (Rural Roads), which amount to one of the largest mobilizations of infrastructure in the developing world’s history. The underlying logic of development in India’s case is intuitive: freeing up women’s time from drudgery-related chores of collecting water, managing sanitation, collecting biomass fuels, and lighting homes would create a temporal dividend that they can use to engage in more productive economic pursuits. Yet, over precisely the same period, India’s Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) has crashed to all-time low levels from 33% in 1972-73 to a mere 17.5% in 2017-18, which is a record low since India’s independence. In rural India, the Female Worker Population Ratio has fallen to 22.0% in 2017-18 from 41.6% in 2004-05(Nikore,2021). This represents one of the most significant but under-explored paradoxes in South Asian development in recent decades: a country that has been rolling out unprecedented levels of infrastructure to save women’s time appears to preside over a labor force where women are visibly retreating.

The implicit logic of these programs derives from the Women in Development (WID) efficiency framework: freeing women’s time from drudgery will redirect it toward labour market participation and income generation. This paper argues that this premise fails — not because infrastructure is irrelevant, but because time freed from one task does not automatically become a capability for labour market entry. The causal pathway runs as follows: infrastructure investment generates task-specific time savings, but whether that saved time flows toward paid work depends on a second set of mediating conditions — patriarchal household norms governing whose time may be reallocated, the structural availability of decent proximate employment, and care-work standards that expand to absorb any freed time. Absent these conversion factors, the temporal dividend is captured by care intensification rather than labour force entry. This paper tests these competing pathways empirically.