Inside the miserable world of India's domestic workers

Photo Source : Pinterest

Middle-class India’s greatest shame is its employment of underage children as domestic workers.

This is where children of relative privilege learn early to accept and normalize inequality, lessons they learn for life. Since domestic workers are mostly unregistered and are an invisible workforce, the actual numbers may be much higher. For instance, the study estimated that households in Delhi and Mumbai employ six hundred thousand domestic workers respectively, but activists place the numbers at one million in each city. There are three categories of domestic workers: residential workers who work 24x7, many of who are recruited through placement agencies; full-day workers who work from morning to evening for nine hours or more; and part-time workers who carry out specific tasks in more than one household and are normally recruited directly from and reside in slum areas.

In Indian homes, there are often separate plates for the help to eat from, and they almost never eat at the same table as their employers. They are usually made to sit on the floor for their meals. They are not given the same food as the employers, but rationed quantities of coarser, cheap food, or leftovers.

'People eat first, they later; People sit on chairs and they on the floor; People call them by their names and they address us by titles.'

Photo Source : Pinterest

Additional tasks range from washing and ironing clothes, walking the dog, cleaning cars, mopping floors and toilets, and many others. They spend many hours, often without breaks, sweeping and swabbing floors, washing clothes, cooking and taking care of the aged and children.

This is an invisible and powerless category of workers and, therefore, there are no reliable estimates of child domestic workers. The official study conducted by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) estimates that 20 per cent of all domestic workers are under fourteen years of age