Underpaid, vulnerable & often abused, domestic helps need a helping hand

Today is International Domestic Workers' Day. The sector remains unregulated, but a clutch of start-ups is trying to change that

In early February, Anita Shyam (name changed) was admitted to a hospital in Gurugram, Haryana, with face injuries, cuts and burn scars all over her body. The minor, a domestic worker from Jharkhand, was allegedly tortured by her employers, a young couple. The woman worked with a leading public relations firm and her husband with an insurance company.

Police investigation found that Shyam, 17, was hired through an unregistered Delhi-based private agency on a deposit of Rs 30,000. Her salary was to be Rs 10,000 a month, but she hadn’t been paid a rupee in the five months she had worked for the couple.

Three months later, on May 31, another chilling news involving another domestic worker, again a minor, made headlines. The 15-year-old girl had been missing from her home in Jharkhand’s Simdega district since February. Her body was found hanging in a house in Delhi’s Rajouri Garden. She was suspected to have been trafficked by an unregistered placement agency.

Nirmal Gorana, state convenor of the National Campaign Committee for Eradication of Bonded Labour, has been working on the case closely. He alleges that the agency had no registration number or contact person. “For days, the agency refused to consider the minor’s pleas to return home. After her suicide, the police initially asked us to file a first information report (FIR) in Jharkhand since the crime had ‘originated’ there,” he says.

According to the latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2021, 2,189 cases of human trafficking were registered – 27.7 per cent more than 2020. Of the 6,533 victims reported to be trafficked, 2,877 were minors.

The market of providing care and domestic work is unregulated. The official count of domestic workers varies significantly on different portals.

According to the last Census in 2011, India had 4.7 million domestic workers. The National Sample Survey 2011-2012, meanwhile, put the number at 3.9 million. The latest data on the e-Shram portal says India has 27.9 million domestic and household workers (as on January 30, 2023). Of these, 26.7 million are women.

Unofficial estimates suggest that this count could be a gross underestimation. The International Labour Organisation indicates that the actual number could be between 20 and 80 million.

“People, especially women in the age group of 12-32, are picked up by the local agents who then connect them with the unregistered placement agencies,” says Gorana. The women, who are mostly from Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Rajasthan, are forced to live in pitiable conditions before they are employed, he adds. There is no proper system to manage the workforce.

According to a 2021 report in the Economic and Political Weekly, the tribal pockets of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are recruitment hubs for these placement agencies.

Gorana points out the loopholes in the tracking system since domestic workers are not registered under the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, 1979. “(Since) there is no record of the source and destination points, tracing trafficked people after crimes becomes almost impossible,” he says.

There is also no credible data on the number of placement agencies operating in India.

Add to that, a private household is not included in the definition of 'workplace' despite various efforts by the National Commission for Women.

And, only 10 states mandate minimum wages for domestic workers under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948.  Among these are Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab. Whether or not this minimum wage law is implemented is another story.

Even the national capital, which absorbs a large number of domestic workers in the form of migrants, does not have a consolidated list of placement agencies operating within its boundaries.

Under the Delhi Private Placement Agencies (Regulation) Order 2014, the state labour department is required to issue a licence for a placement agency to operate in the city. The order also allows domestic workers to register complaints in case of non-payment of wages, harassment etc with the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

"There is no record maintained by the (labour) department on placement agencies," says Subhash Bhatnagar, founder of Nirmala Niketan, a Delhi-based domestic workers’ collective that abides by the minimum wages rule.

Bhatnagar shares his experience of trying to get a licence for Nirmala Niketan in 2017. "They (officials of the department) were clueless. They did not have any procedure to issue us the licence," he recalls.

A reply to a Right to Information (RTI) filed by Business Standard shows that the Delhi labour department does not have the data of the licences issued to these agencies. Since 2014, the department has penalised 49 agencies, of which 45 penalties were imposed in 2021 alone, the reply shows.

An RTI sent to DCW remained unanswered.

Working conditions for domestic helps remain woeful. Rekha Jadhav, district coordinator, National Domestic Workers’ Movement, says that the placement agencies neither brief the workers about the chores they would be expected to do nor do they lay the ground rules with the employers. “Sometimes, the worker is employed at homes with bedridden patients with no prior information about it,” she says. Pulling them out of the household once they have been hired is extremely difficult in the absence of any helpline number.

“Monetary settlements are done between the agency and the employer; the worker usually isn’t a part of it,” adds Jadhav.

Putting things in order

New-age start-ups have started to disrupt the largely unregulated sector of domestic workers.

For instance, Broomees, a platform that operates in Delhi-NCR and Pune, has over 36,000 workers registered with it. Started in 2020, the start-up ensures the workers are paid according to the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Apart from a nominal booking amount, the entire salary goes to the worker.

Being aware of the nexus that placement agencies have, Broomees is working against human trafficking with local NGOs in Jharkhand. "Once trafficked, it is difficult to rescue a person. So, the idea is to hit at the very root," says Saurav Kumar, co-founder of the firm, adding, "We educate the workers about the registered organisations that they can reach out to for their safety in a big city."

Another aggregator, Bookmybai, which operates in select cities of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka with about 120,000 registered domestic helps, gets the workers into a written contract with the employers with defined responsibilities, work hours and leave.

"An agreement on paper ensures that the worker is not exploited," co-founder Anupam Sinhal says. If a worker faces any issue at the workplace, he or she can contact a dedicated relationship manager of the platform, he adds.