PRIVACY NO SHIELD FOR EXPLOITATION

RECENT oral observations of the Supreme Court on domestic workers have reopened an old but unresolved constitutional dilemma: can the ‘sanctuary’ of the home place certain workers beyond the reach of fundamental rights?

- SANJIV KUMAR

The judicial anxiety articulated—of intrusive inspections, unmanageable litigation and disruption of the human bond within households—is not unfamiliar. It surfaced when Karnataka became the first state to notify minimum wages for domestic workers in 2004. Experience since then offers a corrective grounded not in theory, but in evidence.

Domestic work remains among the most hazardous forms of labour in India. Performed in isolated and undocumented workplaces, it is overwhelmingly feminised and structurally vulnerable. Estimates suggest that India has 8-10 crore domestic workers. To exclude such labour from statutory wage protection is not regulatory restraint; it is constitutional abdication.

Acentral reason this sector continues to be debated in abstraction is the persistent absence of reliable, disaggregated and periodically updated data—numbers, wages, hours and conditions. This data vacuum has allowed anecdote, fear and middleclass anxiety to substitute for evidence.