Accounting for the Unaccounted: Shadow Work, Invisible Labor, and the Unseen Backbone of India’s Economy

Abstract

India marching at a centennial, an equally unseen but crucial part about its economy has avoided being analyzed — shadow work. Shadow work, unpaid and undervalued labor propelling both households and markets in nature, hits more women, informal workers, digitally included individuals. By using data from the 2019 Time Use Survey, workforce registry on digital platform labor and welfare delivery mechanisms, this paper empirically investigates how the time poverty of straddling digital systems management, emotional labor and unpaid gig-related chores are shaped by economic mismeasurement. Stemming from feminist and behavioral economics traditions, this critiqued engagement of India in its labor metrics imagines a revitalized inclusion framework that normalizes and values unpaid productivity. It's a call to transform digital governance based on the human, regular time-use audits and a whole new valuation of care and instrumental work in policy sciences. An initial cross-disciplinary explanation calls for a transition away from GDP-based development paradigms to more inclusive approaches that reflect the lived economic realities of India’s invisible workforce.

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