Domestic workers, invisible rights

Two days after International Domestic Workers Day, Manish Gupta, a 50-year-old dermatologist, reportedly frustrated by his wife’s refusal to sack their domestic worker for bringing “bad energy” to the house, took a bat to Meena Halder, knocked her unconscious and then allegedly stabbed her repeatedly with a knife.

Found squatting near her body at his home in Delhi’s Kailash Hills, Gupta is said to have confessed to killing Meena Halder, a 45-year-old domestic worker from Kolkata who had worked with his family for over 10 years. It is reported that he was on anti-depressants.

The crime, once again, focuses attention on the precarity of the lives of domestic workers in Delhi and across the country.

What is the value and worth of a domestic worker’s life if it can be snuffed out for bringing “bad energy”?

What guarantee does she have of her security and safety when she enters somebody else’s home to cook, clean and labour for less-than-minimum wage?

Is there a contract that secures the terms of her employment—including paid time off, overtime, notice period and gratuity?

Is she covered for an accident, or death, that takes place at her workplace?

Labour laws do not formally recognise domestic workers as workers with rights or, for that matter, private homes as workplaces. An early effort to recognise rights was made in 1959, but the Domestic Workers (Conditions of Service) Bill was never passed. Subsequent efforts in 2008 and 2017 also failed to take off or were just plain inadequate. The Code on Social Security 2020 does include informal workers, but lacks the muscle for enforcement, says Samiksha Jha of the Martha Farrell Foundation (MFF), a non-profit that works for the advocacy of the rights of domestic workers.

This lack of legislative intent displays an attitude that comes from the fact that not only are domestic workers overwhelmingly female but many come from marginalised backgrounds, Adivasis or Dalits. “Domestic workers clean homes, cook meals, care for children, the elderly, and the sick. Yet this labour continues to be viewed as an extension of women’s traditional household duties rather than as formal employment,” finds a 2025 report, Work Without Security by MFF.

Moreover, points out Jha, the lead author of the report, those who make laws and provide for protections are from the employer class that depends on the low wages of domestic workers to keep their homes running and in order.

Unless the violence is egregious, there is very little attention on the abuse of domestic workers. Exploitation is, of course, par for the course. On June 13, a 39-year-old woman from Birbhum district, West Bengal, was rescued from an apartment in Gurugram where she had been confined and forced to work for two years. Newspapers report that the woman, Bhadu Mandi had been placed in her job after a payment of Rs 40,000 to a placement agency. Once there she was not allowed any contact with her family.

Fifteen years ago on June 16, millions of domestic workers worldwide gained a hugely belated recognition of their labour through the adoption of the Convention on Domestic Workers at the International Labour Conference in Geneva. For the first time, domestic workers were formally recognised as workers entitled to the same rights and protections as any other worker. The convention mandates daily and weekly rest hours, and minimum wage requirements.

Although India was a signatory, we did not ratify the convention. This means India is not obliged to enforce the convention’s recommendations, including taking protective measures against violence against domestic workers.

On January 29 this year, the Supreme Court refused to declare minimum wages for domestic workers a fundamental right under Article 23 of the Constitution. It was the job of state governments to review the issue and develop mechanisms for worker protection, the court said.

The apex court was hearing a case brought by 10 trade unions and associations representing domestic workers from across India demanding minimum wage and wage protection frameworks. By warning that the demand for a mandatory minimum wage could lead to mass unemployment if families decided to stop hiring domestic help altogether, Chief justice Surya Kant appeared to acknowledge the reality of exploitative wages.

The January judgement was also a dramatic turn-around from the Supreme Court’s own 1982 position where justice P.N. Bhagwati ruled that forcing a person to work at less than minimum wage due to that person’s poverty amounted to forced labour. The ruling came in the context of the case brought by the People’s Union of Democratic Rights which said the wages paid to construction workers for the Asiad Games amounted to forced labour.

The recent growth of app-based domestic work platforms that offer services allowing households to hire domestic workers for a range of tasks from cooking to caregiving, once again raises the question of regulation and fair wages. Technology may have modernised the buying and selling of labour but the fact remains: There is no law to regulate the labour of domestic workers who sustain millions of Indian households.

The idea of putting a value to housework when it is performed by a homemaker received a massive boost by the Supreme Court last week. Adjudicating on a question of adequate compensation for the death of a homemaker in a car accident, the apex court acknowledged that unpaid contribution to running her home was immense—going so far as to call it nation-building—and placed a notional value of Rs 30,000 a month on such work.

The logical next question then must be, if a homemaker’s life is worth Rs 30,000 a month what is the worth of the life of a domestic worker? Is the labour of a homemaker to be placed at a higher value than the work of a woman who bears the burden of unpaid care work in her own home, in addition to seeking employment in other homes? Or are we now at a point where we must recognise the labour of poorer women to be an essential enabler, “nation building”, to use the Supreme Court’s term, to women who go out and seek lucrative employment because they know their kids will be fed and looked after by the domestic workers they recruit?

Domestic workers are among the workers most essential to India’s economy and urban middle-class lifestyles. Their labour enables millions of other people—especially professional women—to participate in paid work. It’s time we recognised their contribution and their right to fair wages and decent work.

The boundary between work and family life is increasingly blurred with mothers carrying more of the load that comes with trying to balance what their family needs with what their work demands.

A new Pew Research Centre study finds a sharp gender divide with 52% of full time working mothers saying being a parent made it a lot more difficult to advance in their job because of the pressure of juggling work with family responsibilities while only 38% of fathers said the same.

Both moms and dads universally dislike missing out on a child’s concert or other activity because of their job, but the unhappiness runs deeper among full-time working mother with 65% saying they were ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ upset when this happens, compared to 45% of fathers who felt the same.

While 65% of mothers who work full time said they didn’t have enough time to exercise—52% of dads said the same—and were also more likely to say they had too little time for hobbies, friends, relaxing and spending time with a spouse or partner.

Read the study here.

Thirteen years after a woman journalist accused Tehelka editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal of sexual assault in a hotel elevator in Goa in November 2013, and five years after his acquittal by a trial court, the Goa government, represented by solicitor general Tushar Mehta, finally challenged the acquittal in the high court on the grounds that it was ‘perturbing’.

The trial court had acquitted Tejpal since, in the eyes of the judge, the woman had failed to demonstrate the kind of behaviour a survivor of sexual assault might demonstrate—though mercifully she stopped short of prescribing what such behaviour might consist of. Mehta told the high court that during the cross examination, the woman was virtually put on trial and asked about her views on drinking, smoking and sex. She had told the court that sex was not a taboo provided it’s consensual.

A clutch of petitions filed in various high courts had followed the hasty passage of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026. This week, the Supreme Court has issued notice on the union government’s plea to transfer all such individual cases to the apex court to avoid conflicting rulings. Petitions filed before the high courts of Rajasthan, Delhi Karnataka and Kerala have now been stayed and will be heard by the Supreme Court.

Kids under 16 in Britain will be barred from accessing major social media platforms in the UK in the near future. Prime minister Keir Starmer has announced a comprehensive package of measures to this end that includes restrictions on AI chatbots and time limits.

In December, Australia became the first country to bar under-16s from many social media apps. But an investigation by New York Times finds that six months in, young teenagers in Australia who were already using social media are still doing so. Experts hope the benefits will kick in by the next generation. That story is here.

The first woman archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally has formally apologised for the Church of England’s role in forcibly separating 185,000 children from their mothers only because they were unmarried. The children were taken away and put up for adoption in the years following World War II.

And the good news… hundreds of women with hard-to-treat ovarian cancer can now be offered a new life-prolonging treatment after NHS England approved the introduction of a new drug for resistant ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer affects more than 300,000 women a year and about 80% will have advanced disease relapse and eventually develop resistance to chemotherapy.

That’s it for now. I welcome feedback at namita.bhandare@gmail.com. See you again next week. Produced by Shad Hasnain.