"Supreme Court assigns notional value to homemakers' unpaid domestic labour"
Care economy
the aggregate of paid and unpaid work involved in caring for people, largely performed by women and invisible in GDP
Unpaid care work
domestic labour (cooking, childcare, elder care) performed without monetary compensation, distinct from both wage employment and asset ownership
The question of whether unpaid domestic work constitutes 'real' labour has deep roots in both feminist economics and Indian constitutional jurisprudence. Articles 14, 15, and 16 of the Constitution guarantee equality before law and prohibit discrimination on grounds of sex, while Article 39(d) directs the state to ensure equal pay for equal work. Yet these provisions, framed around formal employment, have historically failed to capture the vast universe of unpaid care work performed predominantly by women — cooking, childcare, elder care, household management, and emotional labour.
Gender roles in India, as the NCERT Home Science curriculum itself acknowledges, are socially constructed and passed down across generations. The traditional assignment of men as breadwinners and women as homemakers has been in slow transition, but the transition has been uneven: women have entered paid work in growing numbers while simultaneously retaining near-total responsibility for unpaid domestic work. This 'double burden' is not merely a social inconvenience — it has measurable economic consequences. The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action called for recognition and measurement of unpaid care work in national accounting systems, a commitment that most countries, including India, have implemented only partially through satellite accounts rather than mainstream GDP measurement.
The legal system has engaged with this question primarily through tort law — specifically, motor accident compensation cases — where courts have had to assign a monetary value to the lost labour of a deceased homemaker. This jurisprudence has evolved significantly, moving from nominal or zero valuations toward recognition that domestic labour has genuine economic worth.
Unpaid care work encompasses all the labour performed within households for the benefit of family members without monetary compensation. Feminist economists distinguish this from the gender wage gap (the difference in earnings between men and women in paid employment) and the gender wealth gap (the disparity in asset ownership). Unpaid care work is the foundational layer beneath both: it subsidises the formal economy by reproducing the labour force, yet remains invisible in national income accounts.
In India, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data reveals the scale of women's economic marginalisation: 86% of women workers are informally employed, 77% of rural women workers are in agriculture, and 73% of rural women workers are self-employed. These figures do not capture the additional hours of unpaid domestic labour that the same women perform. Time-use surveys — India conducted its first comprehensive Time Use Survey in 2019 — show that Indian women spend on average 7.2 hours per day on unpaid domestic and care activities, compared to 2.8 hours for men. …
'Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action', often seen in the news, is
With reference to the 'Pradhan Mantri Surakshit Matritva Abhiyan', consider the following statements:
1.This scheme guarantees a minimum package of antenatal care services to women in their second and third trimesters of pregnancy and six months post-delivery health care service in any government health facility.
2.Under this scheme, private sector health care providers of certain specialities can volunteer to provide services at nearby government health facilities.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Consider the following statements regarding the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005:
1.It granted daughters equal coparcenary rights in ancestral Hindu undivided family property.
2.It applies retrospectively to daughters born before 2005.
3.It eliminated the distinction between self-acquired and ancestral property for the purpose of succession.
Assertion (A): India's GDP does not capture the full economic contribution of women.
Reason (R): India's Time Use Survey (2019) found that women spend significantly more hours per day on unpaid domestic and care activities than men.
Which of the following is correct?
With reference to the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), which of the following was among its key demands regarding unpaid work?
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