Every morning across India, before offices open, traffic swells, or markets stir, millions of women step into other people’s homes to begin the labour that keeps this country functioning. They sweep floors, scrub utensils, cook meals, care for children, support persons with disabilities, and tend to the elderly. Their work sustains households, enables middle-class productivity, and fills a vast care gap that both the market and the state have long ignored. Yet despite their indispensable contribution, domestic workers remain among India’s most invisible, underpaid, and inadequately protected workers.
This invisibility is not accidental. It is built into the structure of India’s informal economy.
Official and survey-based estimates suggest India has between 4 and 10 million domestic workers, though unions and worker organisations argue the true number is far higher because millions remain uncounted in informal, part-time, seasonal, and migrant arrangements. The overwhelming majority are women, many from Dalit, Adivasi, minority, and economically marginalised communities. They migrate from rural poverty, agrarian distress, or debt into urban centres seeking survival, only to enter a labour system where their work is essential, but their rights remain fragile.
In states like Odisha, this contradiction is especially stark. Economically distressed districts such as Nuapada, Koraput, Kalahandi, Rayagada, Nabarangpur, and Malkangiri have long witnessed migration driven by poverty, limited livelihood opportunities, and uneven development. Odisha is both a source region for migrant domestic labour and a state whose growing cities—Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Berhampur—depend heavily on domestic workers from vulnerable communities. These women often carry the burden of sustaining urban households while remaining excluded from basic labour dignity themselves.
India still lacks a comprehensive national law dedicated specifically to domestic workers’ rights.
This legal vacuum is one of the country’s most persistent labour injustices. Domestic workers are nominally included within broader frameworks such as the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008 and the Code on Social Security, 2020, but implementation remains weak and fragmented. While domestic workers are theoretically covered under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 through district-level Local Committees, poor implementation, lack of awareness, and dysfunctional complaint mechanisms leave many women effectively without recourse. Meanwhile, India has still not ratified ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, adopted in 2011, which would signal stronger global commitment to recognising domestic work as real work deserving real protections.
For millions of women, this means employment without contracts, wages without guarantees, and abuse without accountability.
The problem begins with language. Domestic workers are still routinely described as “maids” or “help”—terms that deliberately blur the employer-employee relationship. This fiction allows society to treat wages as generosity rather than compensation, and exploitation as informality rather than injustice. It allows women working 10 or 12 hours across multiple homes to be denied paid leave, maternity support, social security, or even timely wages because their labour is still viewed through the lens of class hierarchy rather than worker rights.
In Odisha, domestic workers’ collectives have repeatedly highlighted poor wages, inconsistent payments, and vulnerability to abuse, especially among migrant and live-in workers whose dependence on employers may include food and shelter. This dependence can deepen exploitation. When survival itself depends on employer goodwill, resistance becomes risky.
The story of Banita Senapati from a slum in Bhubaneswar illustrates this reality with painful clarity. A widow supporting her daughter through domestic work, Banita reportedly faced harassment, false accusations, verbal abuse, and physical intimidation from an employer. Her case did not become significant simply because abuse occurred—sadly, many such stories remain invisible—but because she fought back. Supported by her domestic workers’ collective and grassroots organisers, Banita pursued police action and secured accountability. Her struggle is both inspiring and unsettling: inspiring because collective solidarity worked, unsettling because dignity at work should not require extraordinary courage and organisational backing.
No worker should need a movement behind her simply to demand safety.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these structural inequalities even more brutally. Across India, domestic workers were among the first to lose employment and among the last to regain stability. Many were dismissed without wages during lockdowns. Migrant domestic workers found themselves stranded in cities without income, transport, or formal recognition as workers. Relief systems often failed because so many existed outside formal databases. The pandemic did not create this precarity—it revealed how deeply embedded it already was.
Now climate change is intensifying this injustice.
As India faces longer summers, harsher heat waves, erratic rainfall, cyclones, and urban flooding, domestic workers—especially those who walk long distances, travel between multiple employers, live in informal settlements, or work in poorly ventilated homes—are increasingly on the frontlines of climate vulnerability. Heat exhaustion, dehydration, sunstroke, and lost wages due to extreme weather are becoming occupational risks. Yet unlike many formal workers, domestic workers are rarely protected by heat action plans, workplace safety standards, or climate-responsive labour policies.
Protecting domestic workers in an era of climate crisis requires urgent reforms.
Employers must be legally obligated to provide safe drinking water, rest breaks, access to fans or cooling spaces, and schedule flexibility during extreme heat advisories. Domestic workers should never be forced to travel or perform strenuous tasks during peak heat wave hours without safeguards. State governments must explicitly include domestic workers in Heat Action Plans, disaster preparedness systems, and social protection measures. Portable summer safety kits—including ORS, umbrellas, caps, and emergency health access—should be integrated into welfare board support. During cyclones, floods, or extreme weather disruptions, domestic workers should be guaranteed paid climate leave or emergency compensation so that survival does not mean forfeiting income. Climate justice must include labour justice.
To address this crisis, welfare alone is not enough. Domestic workers do not need occasional relief; they need structural recognition.
First, India urgently requires a comprehensive national law that explicitly recognises domestic work as formal labour. Such legislation must establish enforceable contracts, minimum wages, regulated working hours, overtime protections, paid leave, social security, and retirement benefits.
Second, district-level grievance systems under the POSH Act must be made functional, accessible, and accountable. Legal inclusion without implementation is little more than symbolic protection.
Third, state welfare boards—including Odisha’s existing frameworks for unorganised workers—must expand beyond limited registration and narrow compensation structures. Death or accidental benefits alone cannot substitute for health insurance, pensions, maternity benefits, childcare, and emergency livelihood protection.
Fourth, placement agencies recruiting women and girls into domestic work must be regulated to prevent trafficking, coercion, and exploitative migration.
Finally, domestic workers’ unions, collectives, and grassroots organisations must be treated as central stakeholders in policy design. Across Odisha and India, these groups have often succeeded where institutions have failed—negotiating wages, supporting survivors, and creating pathways to justice.
At its core, this is not just a labour policy issue. It is a question of what kind of society India wants to be.
A nation cannot celebrate economic growth while millions of women who clean its homes, raise its children, and care for its elderly remain trapped in legal ambiguity and social invisibility. Domestic workers are not peripheral to India’s economy—they are central to its daily functioning. They make possible the productivity of countless households and industries.
They are workers.
And workers deserve dignity, safety, and rights.
The real challenge is not whether India values domestic labour—it clearly does, because millions of households depend on it. The challenge is whether India is willing to value the workers themselves.
For too long, the country’s care economy has rested on cheap, feminised, invisible labour, protected more by silence than by law.
India’s invisible backbone has carried this burden for generations.
It is time, finally, to stop asking it to burn in silence.
Debabrat Patra is Associate Director and Humanitarian Lead, ActionAid Association
The views expressed in this article are individual and do not necessarily reflect that of the organisation.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth