The National Time Use Survey (TUS) is a periodic survey conducted across the country by the National Statistics and Surveys Office (NSSO), Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (MoSPI), Government of India. The most recent survey was conducted in 2024 and its results are available here.

The main goal of the survey is to measure how people spend their time. The activities that are measured include time spent sleeping, working, commuting, shopping, eating and drinking, socialising, taking care of children, taking care of other adults, and many other such activities. It provides important insights into how people are occupied and what interventions are needed from the policy perspective. The complete set of activities the survey measures can be accessed here.

For the purpose of this analysis, we compare six large cities of India – Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata. The data for Hyderabad is too less to provide meaningful insights. In this analysis we look at how much time is spent on employment, commuting and on recreation. In the next part we’ll see the time spent on child care and domestic work and how that is split across genders.

Out of the total respondents, Delhi has the highest at close to 6000 respondents followed by Mumbai at just under 4000. While Bengaluru and Pune follow next, the numbers for Chennai and Kolkata fall behind, at less than 2000 total respondents. In terms of gender, the number of women respondents in Delhi falls well behind the men, while it is most equal in Chennai, Kolkata and Pune.

Employment and Commuting

Across all cities, men work over seven hours each day, reaching over eight hours in Delhi and Mumbai. Women work less than men in all the cities, with the number falling below seven hours in Chennai.

In terms of gender split, most of those who spent time on employment were men. The difference is highest in Delhi where less than 17% of the workforce is women, followed by Mumbai where less than 20% of the workforce is women. Other cities are close to or over 25% with Kolkata and Pune having the best ratios among the cities considered.

Being employed also means time spent to reach the workplace and then back home. Contrary to expectations, people in Bengaluru spent the least time commuting, while Kolkata had the longest commute for both men and women.

While men spent more time commuting in most of the major cities, Delhi and Kolkata stood out with women spending more time than men. The difference between the genders is also the highest in Delhi.

Self-care

Self care in the form of sleeping, eating and drinking, and socialising take up a large part of people’s times. When it comes to sleep time, all cities do well, with people spending at least 7 hours sleeping. Chennai comes across as the sleepiest city of all, with both men and women spending more than 9 hours sleeping per day. While people spent more than 8 hours on sleep in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Pune, the number dips under 8 in Delhi and Kolkata. In all cities, except Chennai, men spent much more time sleeping than women.

Eating and drinking are an important part of the day, and similar to sleeping, men spent more time eating and drinking than women. Parity between the genders was seen only in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune. People in Mumbai and Delhi spent the least time on feeding than in other cities, while those in Chennai spent the most time on eating and drinking.

Recreation

Socialising, spending time talking to friends and relatives, is an important leisure activity. Similar to eating and drinking, people in Mumbai spent the least time among the cities on socialising, while those in Pune spent the most, more than double the time in Mumbai.

In the southern cities of Bengaluru and Chennai, men spent more time socialising than women, while the trend was reversed in the rest of the cities, pointing to an interesting cultural divide.

Watching television and other videos is an activity people can be seen indulging in, either with television sets or on their mobile phones. Across all cities, people spend at least two hours of their time on entertainment from videos, and women are seen to spend more time than men on entertainment.

The difference is highest in Chennai where women spend the most time on videos across all cities, but men come fourth. Bengaluru ranks highest for men and second for women. In three of the cities women spend more than 3 hours of their day watching television and videos. Again, a north-south difference is seen here also and needs exploring if there’s a cultural difference.

Conclusions

The National Time Use Survey is an important survey which tells us how people are spending their time every day. This gives us an idea of the larger picture like participation of women in the workforce, time spent on commuting, recreation etc.

The survey however suffers from a lack of enough samples. For cities with populations over 10 million, to sample a few thousand isn’t enough data. For instance, the 78th round Multi Indicator Survey conducted in 2020-21 had close to 9000 entries for Bengaluru and 3600 entries for Chennai.

A glaring omission in the survey is also the absence of people from the third gender. There is only one entry in Delhi, while in the rest of the cities the survey contents itself with just male and female respondents.

Looking beyond these omissions, the lack of women in the labour force has now become a continuing trend. The 6th economic census conducted in 2012-23 noted that women constituted only 26% of the workforce in Bengaluru, and 21% in Chennai. The TUS shows a similar proportion in Bengaluru, and some improvement in Chennai, but the next economic census should give us more clarity on this.

However, despite being more employed and also having to spend time commuting, men spend more time sleeping, eating, drinking and socialising than women. The question that comes to mind is, where do women spend their time? The answer seems obvious, but we’ll see what the survey tells us in the second part of our analysis.