Are young Indians under or overworked? Both are true but AI may change work hours as we go along

In a recent paper by N. Gowthaman, A. Mishra and the writers of this piece titled ‘Young Adults at Work in India’ which uses 2024 Time Use Survey data, we find that just 47% of India’s 200 million young adults aged 20-29 are in paid employment. Another 11% report being in higher education.

Only eight major states—Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, Karnataka, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Haryana—record employment participation above 50% among young adults.

Gangetic belt states are at the lower end, with employment rates for young adults below 40% in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, suggesting that structural constraints on job creation have not yet eased. The majority who are neither in employment nor in education are women.

The quality of employment matters as much as participation. Formal enterprise employment—in the corporate sector, public sector and NGOs—remains below 20% in all states. Even high-performing states rely heavily on household enterprises. In Punjab employment is 46.5% informal versus 7.7% formal; in Gujarat, 46.3% versus 11.8%; and in Maharashtra, 37.0% versus 17.6%.

Another issue is: among those employed, how long are young people working? This is a pertinent question since the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools across industries means less time would be taken to do the same amount of work.

The data reveals a dual reality: excessive work hours for some young adults and too few for others. Consider the findings on actual work hours (or the net workday, excluding breaks). On average, young adults spend 6 hours 55 minutes or nearly 7 hours per day doing paid work. That sounds reasonable until you unpack the numbers.

On average, men in urban household enterprises work the longest at 7 hours and 59 minutes (almost 8 hours), followed closely by men in urban and rural formal enterprises, both averaging over 7.5 hours. Among women, those working in urban formal enterprises (7 hours and 5 minutes) have the longest workdays. In urbanized states—Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Telangana—the gender gap in formal enterprise work hours falls below 30 minutes.

The gender gap in time spent at paid work widens sharply in household enterprises: women in rural household enterprises clock the lowest of any group at just 4 hours and 35 minutes—a full 3 hours and 24 minutes less than their male counterparts. However, while employed young men on average work longer for pay, if unpaid household and care work is added, employed young women work longer hours—9 hours and 31 minutes, versus 7 hours and 57 minutes spent by young men.

Where is overwork most intense? Delhi leads, with young adults recording over 8 hours 30 minutes of net work per day, rising to nearly 9 hours 40 minutes with a daily commute. Gujarat, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh are not far behind.

Long commutes are a structural reality of formal urban employment for India’s young, especially in formal enterprises. When work and commute are combined, more than 1 in 3 young adults in formal enterprises spends over 9 hours per day on work-related activities. Even in informal enterprises, 26.9% of young workers exceed 9 hours of work per day. This highlights how spatial mismatches between jobs and housing, congestion and urban-transport constraints magnify time burdens.

Overall, two patterns stand out. First, for young men, the formal versus household enterprise distinction barely matters for time at work—the difference is marginal across locations. For women, a shift from formal to household-enterprise employment is associated with a collapse in working hours, suggesting that work in informal enterprises remains fragmented by domestic responsibilities and/or lack of paid work.

Second, urbanization alone is insufficient to create full-time jobs and enhance the ability of women to take them. Urban women with informal jobs work over an hour less than those with formal jobs, indicating that a combination of urbanization and formalization—not either in isolation—comes closest to equalizing hours across gender.

As AI reshapes industries globally, India faces a compounding challenge. AI-driven automation tends to displace routine tasks—precisely the kind of work that dominates much of formal employment: basic data entry, coding and repetitive manufacturing. By contrast, household-business work tends to be dominated by tasks that cannot easily be automated. The gap in work hours between the two is therefore likely to shrink.

It is possible that average working hours at formal enterprises will decline with greater heterogeneity among workers. The few who can complement AI as value creators will see higher demand for their skills; their work hours may well rise. Consequently, the gap between formal and household-enterprise work hours may narrow; not because hours in the latter increase, but because those in the former fall on average.

Our GDP debate will go on. What that trillion-dollar GDP figure delivers on the ground matters far more than the headline itself.

The authors are, respectively, Union Bank Chair professor of economics, Great Lakes Institute of Management; and professor, National Council of Applied Economics Research.