It took a Rahul Gandhi to put price on women’s labour at home. Enough of ‘maa ke hath ka khana’

It isn’t every day that a Rahul Gandhi speech goes down without controversy. In a recent video from a rally in Amravati, Maharashtra, the Indian National Congress MP and the star campaigner for his party, made some pointed and irrefutable remarks about the unpaid work women do at home.

“Every woman in this country works outside the home for eight to 10 hours, followed by an eight-hour shift at home,” he said, listing cooking and child care as responsibilities that naturally fall to women and have never been accounted for. “Men will not like what I’ve said, but this is the reality of India,” he said. In the same speech, Gandhi promised that, when it comes to power, the INDIA alliance would deposit Rs 1 lakh annually in the bank accounts of women from poor households.

Gandhi’s address was received warmly, at least on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit comments. Predictably, mainstream news channels that otherwise cannot stop talking about the PM’s ‘nari shakti (women empowerment)’ policies, failed to pick it up. No countershots have been fired by other parties either.

Rahul Gandhi’s promises aren’t new

In a period defined by mangalsutra politics, I truly admire Gandhi’s progressiveness. But he is far from the first political leader to train a spotlight on women’s unpaid labour. Every election season, India’s women are witness to a parade of such promising initiatives. In 2020, Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam party’s manifesto promised homemakers “value rights assistance” amounting to Rs 3,000. Several other parties, including the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), Trinamool Congress, and the Indian National Congress have discussed direct transfer schemes to women.

None of these arguments are new either – these are ideas that have been around at least since the pre-Independence era. In 1946, the All India Women’s Conference presented the Draft of the Indian Woman’s Charter of Rights and Duties at the United Nations. It’s a beautifully progressive document full of hope, and sounds like it could have been written yesterday. Article 8 of the charter holds that “the work of the house-wife has so far received no recognition in the sense that no steps have been taken or thought for the protection of one who works from morning till night without rest or leave or holiday…”

The document states that raising the status, mental and physical health and crucially, the leisure time of “home-makers and the mothers of the race”, is essential. The draft’s suggestions include that women who work at home have a right to a part of their husband’s income, that they must be included in the government’s social insurance schemes aimed at workers, and that “creches, infant classes and pre-basic schools shall be provided by the Government or Municipalities”.

My heart broke a little while reading the charter. Almost 80 years have passed since it was first written, and these are issues that women still grapple with. While many of these stated goals have made their way into law, so many are yet to be fully achieved.

Disproportionate division of labour 

Still, by visibilising the invisible labour of women, Gandhi has endeared himself to the urbane woman voter as much as the rural one. Regardless of class and social status, the bulk of care work is disproportionately the responsibility of women. Every single report and study comes to the same conclusion. According to the first national Time Use Survey conducted in India in 2020 by the National Statistical Office, 81.2 per cent of women engaged in unpaid domestic services. The comparative figure for men is only 26.1 per cent. Women put in more than 10 times the amount of time men did on work that is often described as chores – cooking, cleaning, maintaining the house, child and elderly care — at 34.6 hours versus 3.6 hours.

Maybe a better way to understand unpaid and undervalued work is to actually put a value on it. As this UN report tells us, “the total value of time spent on unpaid care and domestic work by women in India is equivalent to 39 per cent of GDP”. In other words, unpaid work makes the world go round – and women across the globe are enablers of any economic activity.

And yet, we rarely hold women’s work in high regard. We draw distinctions between skilled and unskilled labour, and classify cooking, cleaning, laundry, plus the mental labour that goes into planning all of these, as unskilled. Even though we know the back-breaking effort that goes into domestic work, we devalue it anyway, because domestic work has historically been feminised. A 2020 article by history professor Alexandra Finley in The Washington Post, which discusses women’s labour, states: “During the 19th century, Americans conceptualised domestic labour as feminine and confined to the private home. This made household labour both vital and invisible to society, and the legacies of this way of thinking remain with us today.”

This is exactly how it plays out in India. The initial questions directed at a woman on the arranged marriage circuit are if she can cook, clean, and take care of elders and children. This is almost always context-agnostic – whether the conversation is set in rural or urban India, whether the woman is a highly trained and educated working professional or not.

Domestic labour complex, gruelling

Part of the reason this cycle continues is because we’ve created a self-serving mythology around women as “natural” caregivers or nurturers. When women extend care work to their families, it is signalled as a mark of love and devotion, or supposedly innate qualities, and not something that brings income or enables economic activity. A particularly turgid example of this is the way we endlessly eulogise ‘maa ke hath ka khana (mother’s home-cooked meals)’, but don’t think of it as work that requires skill or talent.

But the truth is domestic labour is complex and frequently gruelling, and women who can afford to, often pass it on to other women. When this labour can be quantified and a price put on it, as in the case of domestic workers, it is some of the lowest-paying work in the country. It’s no different when it comes to the organised sector: An army of Aanganwadi and ASHA workers, for instance, who undertake the gargantuan – but feminised – work of large-scale child and health care, continue to be overworked and underpaid. And when women are underpaid, as they often are even in high-skill fields and for the same work as men, it becomes easier to think of their work as less important.

But we are all better off knowing the value of our work – whether it is professional, skilled, or domestic work, whether we are negotiating salaries or our spaces. And in 2024, the question we should be asking is how do we reimagine “work” to make it work for women. In Uruguay, the Care Act guarantees that all children, persons with disabilities, and the elderly will have the right to access care services. When care becomes the responsibility of the state, it enables women to get paid jobs.

India’s solutions will have to take into account our various contexts and existing frameworks. According to the recommendations by the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, “expansion of anganwadis, primary health care, and public distribution of food items [can] reduce the care burden on women workers.”

Or it could look like the direct transfer of Rs 1 lakh to the bank accounts of poor women. As Rahul Gandhi and other politicians vow to put a price tag on women’s invisible labour, maybe we can start dreaming of a day when this isn’t just a seasonal campaign promise. Until then, we’ll wait, tallying the cost of free labour, one election speech at a time.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)