The woman who has no time

She said it without any fuss. “I woke up earlier. I slept later.” That was how she had managed to attend a government training programme without letting anything at home fall apart. Nobody had pitched in. Nothing had been taken off her plate. She had found the hours by cutting into the only thing that belonged entirely to her: sleep. I have been thinking about that answer for months. Not because it was unusual. Because it was so completely ordinary.

All across rural India, women are being called into what is described as the future. Namo Drone Didi trains them to fly agricultural drones. Livelihood missions put smartphones and seed money in their hands. The photographs from these programmes are easy to find: women in bright saris standing next to machines, looking like proof that something has changed. But I keep getting stuck on what those photographs do not show, which is everything that had to be managed at home before that woman could show up and stand there.

The women I meet during fieldwork are not waiting for an opportunity. Their days are full before the sun is up. Cooking, fetching water, getting children ready for school, looking after the elderly, feeding the animals, then going to the fields. When they come back, the work does not stop. Dinner, dishes, laundry. It does not announce itself and it does not end. For many of them, what counts as one day is really two, folded into each other.

I remember a training session where several women walked in late. Once they sat down, it was obvious they wanted to be there. But the morning had not cooperated. Breakfast first. Animals fed. Children sent off. The training had a start time on paper. The household did not. They had just had more to do before leaving than the schedule had accounted for.

Government programmes are usually well planned. There are trainers, budgets, equipment, targets. But I have yet to come across a planning document that treats time as something a woman might not have to spare. The assumption is always that the time exists somewhere, waiting to be filled productively. It does not. For most women, time spent on a programme has to come from somewhere else: from sleep, from rest, from whatever small gap existed between one task and the next.

The food on the table, the children who reach school on time, the elderly relative who is looked after: none of this appears in any budget. It is work, but it is not counted as work. Economists call it unpaid care work and have been writing about it for decades. Policymakers nod along. But nodding at a problem is not the same as building programmes that account for it.

We talk a great deal about empowering women. We build schemes, hold trainings, count beneficiaries. What we talk about far less is the one thing every opportunity requires: time that is actually free. Not borrowed from sleep. Not squeezed out before dawn. Until programmes are designed with that in mind, through childcare support, community help, or simply a training hour that does not clash with morning cooking, they will keep asking women to add one more thing to a day that was already full.

The woman in the photograph is holding a remote control. She looks confident, and she earned that. But she got there by waking before everyone else and sleeping after everyone else. And when the training is over and the drone is packed away, she will go home to the same evening she always has. The future can wait. The dal on the stove cannot.

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