Gallery
Our Gallery
1. Adopt a Granny
2. Workers in the Shadows or the unknown worker
3. Domestic Workers Jury verdict
4. Behind the Curtains: Continued servitude of domestic workers
5. Visibilising domestic work as decent work
1. Study on Wages/productivity/action research
2. Study on worker facilitation center
3. Research Study on Placement agencies and migrant workers
4. Study on Mobility issues and the unorganaised sector
5. Status of health in urban settlements of Bengaluru
6. Study on Gig Economy in the industrial sector.
Domestic workers face abuse, wage theft, and lack legal safeguards. A Supreme Court order now prompts the Centre to form a panel for a new law.
India’s labour laws are neither directly related to domestic workers nor created considering their challenges and needs, says Geetha Menon. Geetha is co-founder of Stree Jagruti Samiti, an organisation which fights for domestic workers’ rights. “The most important thing in any legislation is the definition. And this is most critical in the case of domestic workers,” she says. From such definition stem answers to questions like who is a domestic worker, what kind of work comes under their ambit, what counts as a workplace, and more.
The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, does cover domestic workers under the ‘wage workers’ category. “The problem is, the definition of social security, the benefits the workers are entitled to get, none of these are specified under the Act. So it is all very arbitrary. It’s left to the whims of the National Social Security Board, which is set up under the Act, to decide what schemes will be introduced,” says Gayatri Singh, a human rights lawyer practising at the Bombay High Court.
We live in fear that if we take a day off, someone else will replace us. There are other domestic workers who are willing to pay less. Even when we are sick, our employers ask us to come to work and rest afterwards," says Sangeeta M., a 30-year-old domestic worker living in Bangalore, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka .
Sangeeta is one of the millions of people who make up India's domestic workforce, for whom job insecurity, vulnerability to abuse , sexual exploitation and harassment , low wages and poor working conditions are a daily reality.
The fight for their rights has been a years-long odyssey with few results. To date, for example, there isn't even accurate or updated data on how many people are employed in this sector. The government estimated there were around four million in 2012 , and the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported between 20 and 80 million in 2010. The official portal for unorganized workers has registered approximately 28.9 million domestic and household workers. The government conducted a national survey of domestic workers in 2024, but the results have not yet been published.
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