Andhra Pradesh’s new Class 1-2 textbooks show men doing half of all household chores

The news

Hyderabad, September 25. Andhra Pradesh’s new textbooks for Classes 1 and 2 show household chores divided equally between men and women, as the State tries to eliminate gender stereotypes from a young age, The Indian Express reports. A gender stereotype is a fixed idea of what men and women should do, for example that cooking and fetching water are women’s work. The new books show a father working alongside the mother in the kitchen, girls playing drums and violins in musical performances, and men and women standing together in a queue to collect water from a common public tap. Other images show a woman selling vegetables, a man weaving a flower garland alongside a woman at a shop, and a man and a woman working together in an agricultural field. “While past textbooks depicted household chores as being performed entirely by women, the new textbooks, introduced recently, changed this approach so that 50% of the household chores shown are performed by men and 50% by women,” an official said. “The aim is to avoid gender stereotyping from the first grade itself,” said the State’s IT and Human Resources Development Minister N. Lokesh Naidu, speaking on Thursday at a chat organised by the Public Affairs Forum of India in Delhi. The new books also introduce children to the “good” and “bad” sides of Artificial Intelligence, so that they understand the technology and use it effectively. Primary schools now observe a “No Bag Day” on Saturdays for value-based and practical learning, including lessons on managing family and agricultural budgets, field exposure visits and an introduction to AI. The government is working on “gamifying” classrooms: after every 45-minute class, students would watch a 60- or 90-second video summarising the lesson and answer four to five questions using clicker technology. The data would feed into the State’s Learning Management System (LMS) to identify individual learning gaps and provide targeted homework and learning material through the LEAP app, open to parents and teachers. On teacher availability, Mr. Lokesh said the share of schools with one teacher per class had risen from 3% in 2024 to 33%, and told The Indian Express on Friday that 16,000 teachers had been recruited in a recent drive, with recruitment to be held every year. The syllabus link is GS1 on the role of women and social empowerment, and GS2 on education as a social sector.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The Time Use Survey measures the unpaid work that GDP does not count. The National Statistics Office (NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation conducted India’s first all-India Time Use Survey in 2019 and a second round in 2024. It records how persons aged six and above spend each minute of a day, separating paid work from unpaid domestic services and unpaid caregiving. Both rounds found that women spend several times more minutes a day than men on unpaid domestic services for household members, while men spend far more time in employment. Because unpaid domestic work within the household is not counted in GDP, this survey is the main official evidence of the burden women carry.
2. Unpaid care work is a leading explanation for India’s low female labour force participation. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), conducted by the NSO since 2017-18, measures the labour force participation rate (LFPR), the share of people who are working or seeking work. Female LFPR in India has risen in recent PLFS rounds but remains far below the male rate, and much of the rise is in self-employment and unpaid work in household enterprises. Surveys consistently find that a large share of women outside the labour force cite domestic duties as the reason. Economists describe the division of domestic chores as a “double burden”: when women take paid work, they usually keep most of the housework too.
3. NEP 2020 and the new curriculum frameworks require gender-sensitive school materials. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 treats gender as a cross-cutting priority, proposes a Gender-Inclusion Fund to help States improve access for girls and transgender students, and recommends bagless days with practical and vocational activities. The National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage (NCF-FS), 2022 covers children aged three to eight, which includes Classes 1 and 2, and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE), 2023 covers the whole school stage. Both frameworks call for learning materials free of gender, caste and other stereotypes. States prepare their own textbooks through their State Councils of Educational Research and Training, since education is in the Concurrent List.
4. The Constitution and the SDGs both name the norm being targeted. Article 51A(e), a Fundamental Duty inserted by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, asks every citizen to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women. Article 15(3) permits special provisions for women and children, and Article 21A, with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, guarantees schooling from six to fourteen years; the RTE Act’s schedule sets pupil-teacher norms for schools. Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality includes Target 5.4, which asks countries to recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through public services, infrastructure and social protection, and through the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family. Andhra’s textbooks are a direct attempt at that last clause.

Why UPSC loves this

1. GS1 regularly asks about women’s work and social norms. UPSC has asked about the reasons for low female labour force participation, the feminisation of agriculture and the effects of patriarchy on women’s status. A question on unpaid care work or the role of education in changing gender norms is squarely within the syllabus heading “role of women and women’s organisation” and “social empowerment”. This story gives a concrete policy example to cite.
2. Prelims tests surveys, frameworks and duties. The Time Use Survey, the PLFS and the agencies that run them are standard Prelims material, as are the Fundamental Duties and the SDGs. The NCF-FS and NCF-SE, and which age groups they cover, are likely targets now that States are rolling out new textbooks under them.
3. Essay and GS2 use school reform as a test of governance. Essay topics on gender equality and on education as a lever of social change recur. The Andhra reforms also carry a governance thread: learning data, teacher recruitment and the one-teacher-per-class goal are what examiners mean by outcome-focused school administration.

Analysis

1. Textbooks work on the norm before it hardens, which is why the early grades matter. By six or seven, children already hold clear ideas about which jobs belong to which sex, learned at home and reinforced by what they see in school. Images in a Class 1 book are looked at repeatedly, discussed aloud and often copied in drawing, so they shape expectations more than a lesson in a later grade. The earlier Andhra books, by the official’s own account, showed chores done entirely by women, which means the school system was actively teaching the stereotype. Correcting that costs almost nothing, since textbooks are revised anyway. The limitation is that a picture competes with a child’s daily experience at home, and home usually wins.
2. The 50:50 rule is a blunt tool, but a measurable one. Counting chores and splitting them equally can look mechanical, and a critic could say it presents an ideal that few Indian homes match. But a numerical rule is auditable: anyone can open the book and check it, which is not true of vague commitments to “gender sensitivity”. It also forces illustrators and writers to think about every image rather than defaulting to habit. The better test will be whether the next classes’ books continue the approach and whether teachers use the images to start conversations rather than simply pass over them.
3. The economic stake is women’s time, and schools can only address one part of it. The Time Use Surveys show that women do most of India’s unpaid domestic work, and this is a major reason many stay out of paid jobs. Changing boys’ expectations about housework is a long-run way to share that burden, but its effect on labour markets will take a generation. In the meantime, the time women spend fetching water, cooking with inefficient fuels and caring for children and the elderly is better reduced by piped water, clean cooking fuel and creches. The textbook reform complements that infrastructure; it cannot substitute for it.
4. The real risk to the reform lies in the classroom, not in the book. A teacher who laughs at the picture of a father cooking, or who asks only girls to clean the classroom, undoes the lesson. Gender-sensitive textbooks have been produced in several States before, and evaluations of such efforts tend to find that teacher attitudes and school practices decide outcomes. Andhra’s recruitment of 16,000 teachers is an opportunity to build gender sensitisation into induction training. Without it, the new books risk being treated as a change of illustrations rather than of ideas.
5. The data-driven classroom brings benefits and questions of its own. The plan to follow every 45-minute class with a short video and clicker questions, feeding an LMS that sets targeted homework through the LEAP app, could identify learning gaps early, which is the central weakness of Indian primary schooling. It also creates detailed data on young children, which raises questions of consent, storage and use that the reports do not address. Frequent short quizzes can crowd out play-based learning, which the foundational-stage framework emphasises. The rise from 3% to 33% of schools with one teacher per class shows real progress, but it also means two-thirds of schools still fall short of that goal, and technology cannot replace a teacher in those classrooms.

Administrator's brainstorm