Social norms around the division of household work disproportionately burden women in India. Women spend significant amounts of time (approximately 50 hours per week) on domestic chores, of which cooking and cleaning house, clothes and utensils form the bulk, while 15-20 per cent of the time spent on household work consists solely of child care, according to the last Time Use Survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation in 1998. This allocation of time to household chores is accompanied by low female labour force participation (about 25 per cent), which has declined in rural areas (and remained stagnant in