In February 2024, the Supreme Court of India, in Arvind Kumar Pandey v. Girish Pandey [2024], delivered a landmark judgment addressing the valuation of unpaid domestic and care work (UDCW) performed by homemakers. The Court held that a homemaker’s ‘deemed income’—used for the purposes of compensation or legal recognition—cannot be assessed below the minimum wages prescribed for a daily wage worker under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 (MWA). Importantly, the Court acknowledged that although UDCW is difficult to quantify, it is equally essential to household livelihood as monetized income.
Traditionally, Indian courts have recognized UDCW primarily within the framework of family law (divorce and maintenance) and tort law (claims arising from death or injury). Early jurisprudence treated UDCW through the narrow category of ‘loss of services to the family’, and compensation was calculated based on the cost of hiring domestic help. However, this approach failed to account for the intangible, long-term, and affective labor involved in caregiving and social reproduction—such as nurturing emotional bonds, raising children, and managing intergenerational well-being.
This limited conception is rooted in a patriarchal view of domestic labor—one that sees such work as a moral duty of women, particularly as wives and mothers, rather than as productive labor deserving recognition and remuneration. As a result, UDCW was historically undervalued or invisibilized within the legal and economic frameworks.
A jurisprudential shift began to emerge in cases such as Rajam v. Manikya Reddy [1988] and National Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Minor Deepika [2009]. These decisions moved beyond the commodified view of household services and emphasized that the contributions of a homemaker cannot be fully substituted by paid domestic labor. The courts began to appreciate the role of homemakers in social reproduction—the process of sustaining and nurturing human life, capacity, and relationships across generations.
In these cases, the judiciary expanded the legal recognition of UDCW from merely physical domestic labor to include the intellectual, emotional, and social care performed within the household. This marked a subtle but important evolution—from valuing what homemakers do to valuing the broader impact of their work on familial and societal well-being.
The 2024 Arvind Kumar Pandey decision builds upon this trajectory, anchoring judicial recognition of UDCW in statutory labour rights. By linking ‘deemed income’ to minimum wage standards, the Court implicitly acknowledged unpaid domestic and care work as work—not charity, not familial duty, but labour deserving legal value. This articulation opens the door to broader conversations on wage parity, care economies, and the redistribution of unpaid labor in gendered spaces.
The judicial recognition of unpaid domestic and care work (UDCW) has gradually expanded within Indian tort law, particularly through cases under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 (MVA). In Arun Kumar Agrawal v. National Insurance Company [2010], the Supreme Court acknowledged the economic contribution of homemakers but took issue with the Delhi High Court’s method of valuation. The High Court had relied on the minimum wage of a skilled worker as a proxy, which the Supreme Court rejected on the grounds that it treated a homemaker like a contract-bound employee, ignoring the personal, relational, and continuous nature of caregiving.
Instead, the Court invoked the Second Schedule of the MVA, which prescribed the notional income of a homemaker as one-third of the husband’s earnings. However, this method, though standardized, reflects dated gender assumptions—equating the value of a woman’s labour to her husband’s earning capacity rather than her independent contribution.
By contrast, the Madras High Court in 2019 challenged this framework, calling it anachronistic in a time when many women earn as much or more than their spouses. The Court awarded compensation based on the prospective earnings of the deceased homemaker, adding 50% under ‘future prospects’—a clear departure from symbolic valuation towards more individualized and economically grounded recognition.
Yet, despite these judicial attempts, a full conceptual shift remains elusive. Even in landmark judgments, courts have been reluctant to detach UDCW from its gendered and moralistic framing, often cloaking the discussion in terms of familial loss or altruistic sacrifice. The Supreme Court in Arvind Kumar Pandey paid homage to caregiving as an emotional and social function of women but failed to engage with its economic dimensions as part of the broader process of social reproduction. The lump sum awarded was devoid of any structured calculation that might suggest UDCW was being considered labour on par with market work.
This raises a critical question: Does the Court’s invocation of minimum wages truly signal progress in recognizing UDCW, or does it remain a symbolic gesture? There are multiple barriers to interpreting this as a meaningful advancement:
- Cultural resistance to ‘commodifying’ family relationships, which continues to shape legal reasoning.
- The Minimum Wages Act, 1948, itself excludes UDCW from the legal definition of “employment” and does not provide a framework for compensating such work.
- Minimum wage, when used as a notional benchmark, may in fact depress the valuation of homemaker contributions, given that even paid domestic labour remains deeply undervalued and underpaid in India.
A more transformative approach may lie in the ‘partnership model’ adopted in Minor Deepika, where the Court conceptualized both spouses as equal contributors to the household unit, regardless of whether their labour was market-based or domestic. Such a framework aligns with a ‘unified conception of the worker’—one that treats caregiving and breadwinning as coequal forms of labour, essential for the sustenance of the family and society.
Ultimately, the true test lies in whether Indian courts can move beyond abstract reverence for caregiving and embrace a framework that treats unpaid domestic and care work as a legitimate, quantifiable economic contribution—not an afterthought, but an equal pillar in the structure of household and national economies.
