Karnataka - Bangalore

The sisters that we depend on

Sugandhi Ravindranathan

It is time the lawmakers gave a thought to improving their lives

IN BONDAGE: A maid at work in a house. — Photo: N. Sridharan

BANGALORE: How many women (or men for that matter), in their award acceptance speeches, give credit to those who take care of their private lives without making a song and dance about it? We're talking about domestic help, those often underpaid people whose contribution cannot be understated when it comes to running households.

The average urban middleclass home will either grind to a halt or seriously malfunction having a domino effect on other aspect of our lives, if the ubiquitous domestic worker does not turn up for work seven — or six, in liberal households — days a week.

Domestic workers form a sizeable chunk of the unorganised sector. A conservative estimate by the Stree Jagruti Samiti puts the figure at four lakh in Bangalore. But Ruth Manorama, recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and secretary of the Karnataka State Slum Dwellers Federation, puts the figure at seven lakh to 10 lakh.

Ms. Manorama, who is one of the secretaries of the National Centre for Labour, estimates that considering that Bangalore's population is 70 lakh, there should a million or so people working as household help.

She bases this figure on the logic that the domestic worker population was 2.5 lakh 20 years ago.

"A majority of them are Dalits," she told The Hindu. "We did a study two-and-a-half years ago and found that 89 per cent of domestic workers are Dalits. At the time we covered 782 workers from 12 slums in the city," she said.

Ms. Manorama, an unflagging campaigner for minimum wages for this unorganised sector, says they should be paid Rs. 2,000 as monthly salary for putting in eight hours in an average household of four.

Though most domestic workers are exploited and paid a pittance for their drudgery, the shifting profile of Bangalore is also changing standards for some of them. Fatima, who used to practically run a bachelor's house for Rs. 2,500 five years ago, was stunned to find her former employer, now married and living in Singapore, at her doorstep asking her if she could move there. She declined as her son was going to a school here and she was being taken care of by her employers.

Vasanthi, married to a former jawan, was bailed out of a difficult situation when her husband wanted to take her teenaged daughter away to his village to marry her off. Her employer, a woman who funds the girl's education, saw to it that the man was put on the first train home.

Sharada, hardworking and taciturn, is equipped with a cellphone so that the three households she works for can tell her what to do, cook, shop. Her older son is an apprentice for a hardware firm and the younger one, as bright as a pin, shyly produces the five medals he has won in his school for academics.

On Tuesday, the world media reported that supermodel Naomi Campbell was sentenced to five days' community service by a Manhattan court as punishment for throwing a cellphone at her housekeeper. The 36-year-old will have to get down on her cute knees and mop the floor of a sanitation building later this month apart from taking anger management classes. May be our lawmakers should look in that direction also.

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