Comment on the changes in the household dimensions of family under modem economic reforms. (2009)
Liberalisation since 1991 is the clearest recent independent variable acting on the Indian household. It did not alter the kinship rules of who counts as family; it altered where members live, what the household produces and consumes, and who earns inside it. Reform reorganised the household without dissolving it, and in several respects made kinship more, not less, necessary.
The household stretched across space
Reform-era growth concentrated work in a few corridors, and the household split rather than migrating whole. The result is the multi-locational household: one member in Surat, Tiruppur or the Gulf, the rest on ancestral land; the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister estimated about 40 crore domestic migrants in 2023. Such a household is simple in composition and joint in function, which makes A. M. Shah’s distinction between the countable residential unit and the wider kin category indispensable. Remittances sustain the rural joint household precisely by keeping one member out of it.
From a unit of production to a unit of consumption
The pre-reform household in agriculture and artisanal trades was a production unit whose members were its workforce. Reform separated the two: wage work moved production outside, while the household became the target of consumer credit, housing loans and goods marketed at the two-generation family. The Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2023-24 records monthly per capita expenditure of about ₹4,122 rural and ₹6,996 urban — the household now identified statistically by what it spends.
Women’s work and the outsourcing of care
- The urban two-earner household emerged, and with it the outsourcing of domestic and care work to paid workers, creches and platform services — one household’s escape from unpaid labour bought from another woman’s.
- The aggregate picture is a puzzle. Female labour force participation (15+) rose from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24 in the Periodic Labour Force Survey, but the rise is largely rural and self-employed, much of it unpaid helper work in household enterprises. Tulsi Patel, in Fertility Behaviour (1994), had shown that women’s reproductive and productive roles are governed by household strategy rather than individual choice.
- Gig and platform work reorganises household time: the NITI Aayog estimated 77 lakh gig workers in 2020-21, rising to 2.35 crore by 2029-30.
The underside
Reform also loaded risk onto the household. The All India Debt and Investment Survey (2019) found indebtedness in 35 per cent of rural and 22.4 per cent of urban households, and over half of agricultural households indebted. Health and education costs were privatised into household budgets, and the elderly left behind in emptied villages.
The counter-argument
It is tempting to read this as the market dissolving the family; the evidence points the other way. Because formal credit, childcare, job placement and old-age security remain thin, households fall back on kin for exactly these functions. As Patricia Uberoi argued in Family, Kinship and Marriage in India (1993), the family is not a natural unit the economy erodes from outside but an institution constituted through law, ideology and the state. Reform reassigned functions; it did not abolish the need for them.
Conclusion
Under liberalisation the Indian household has become smaller, more dispersed, more indebted and more consumption-defined, while remaining the primary insurer of its members. The change worth naming is not nuclearisation but the transfer of risk from state and employer to the household, borne disproportionately by the women inside it.