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Rural India spending more time on education than urban India: Survey

2025-02-27 00:00:00.0 商业标准报-经济和政策原网页

People in rural areas spent more time on “learning activities” in 2024 than those in urban parts of India, revealed findings from the latest Time Use Survey (TUS) released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) on Tuesday.

The study also suggested that over the last five years, females have closed the gap with men, who are spending less time on “learning activities” now.

Learning activity includes time spent on formal education which involves school/university attendance, extra-curricular activities, homework among other things. It also includes travelling time related to learning.

But the time spent on “learning activity” saw a decline in both the urban and rural areas in 2024 as compared to what it was in 2019.

Data shows that people in urban areas spent 87 minutes a day on “learning” in 2024, in comparison to 95 minutes in 2019. In rural areas, people spent 90 minutes as compared to 92 minutes earlier in 2019.

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Separately, the gender wise analysis showed that while time spent by women on “learning” remained unchanged at 84 minutes during this time period, the time spent by men declined to 94 minutes from 102 minutes in the last five years.

In TUS 2024, information on time use was collected for persons aged 6 years and above with a reference period of 24 hours. The respondents were asked about their activities performed in the designated time slots of 30 minutes and the same was recorded against the corresponding slot. In case of multiple activities in a time slot, a maximum of three activities which were performed for 10 minutes or more, were recorded.

The activities reported by the respondents were then codified into nine major divisions. Besides, the data showed that the time spent on ‘Employment and related activities’ increased in both the urban and rural areas. While students spent 199 minutes a day in these activities in 2024 in urban areas, as compared to 188 minutes in 2019 - in rural areas, they spent 171 minutes in 2024 as compared to 153 minutes five years ago.

MoSPI conducted the first country-wide Time Use Survey (TUS) during January and December, 2019. The second all-India TUS was conducted after a gap of 4 years for the January-December 2024 period.

“India is among the few countries, including Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, USA and China that conduct the national TUS to analyse how people allocate their time to various daily activities. The primary objective of the survey is to measure the participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities,” the ministry said in a statement.