Anamika Kumar, Law Student at National Law University Meghalaya (NLU Meg) interning at ActionAid Association. The views expressed by the author are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of any affiliated institutions or organizations.

Every year, June 16th marks International Domestic Workers’ Day, a solemn reminder of the indispensable yet underappreciated role that the domestic workers play in the home and economies worldwide. Though there has been some progress towards recognizing domestic workers’ rights, still much is to be achieved to protect them from exploitative working conditions, violations of wages, and other forms of harassment. India’s domestic worker population also continues to be stuck in a legal grey zone, subject to chronic exploitation, legal invisibility, and systemic neglect. Despite being a large and expanding sector of employment, domestic work in India continues to suffer from legislative underreach, enforcement lapses, and institutional apathy.

In India, domestic workers form a significant segment of the vast informal sector, with their estimated numbers varying widely depending on the source. Government data places the number of domestic workers at approximately 4.75 million, while the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates it to be closer to 20 million. However, unions and worker collectives, based on ground realities and unregistered employment patterns, suggest that the actual number may be as high as 50 to 90 million.

Domestic workers are technically included within the broad definition of workers under India’s four labour codes — the Code on Wages, 2019; the Code on Social Security, 2020; the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020; and the Industrial Relations Code, 2020. However, their unique vulnerabilities, working conditions, and employment arrangements are not specifically addressed, leaving significant gaps in their legal protection.

At the national level, while no comprehensive legislation has yet been enacted to protect domestic workers separately, the Central Government, through the Ministry of Labour and Employment, has initiated steps toward formulating a National Policy on Domestic Workers, which currently remains at the draft stage. The suggested policy seeks to extend legal recognition and social security coverage to domestic workers by bringing them under the purview of current labour legislations. It attempts to give domestic workers the right to register as unorganized sector workers, thus easing access to welfare benefits and social protection.The policy draft also acknowledges their right to unionization, minimum wage, access to training, and prevention of abuse and exploitation. It also provides for redressal of grievances, regulation of private placement agencies, and access to judicial fora for adjudication of disputes.While these provisions reflect a positive direction, the absence of binding legislation and the slow pace of policy finalization continue to leave millions of domestic workers without enforceable legal safeguards.

In a bid to put informal sector employees, including domestic workers, under one database, the Government of India introduced the e-Shram portal in 2021. The portal allows unorganized sector workers to register themselves voluntarily with their Aadhaar-linked mobile numbers, thus establishing a national database that would go on to ease access to different social security schemes. However beyond social security, the need is also to deal with specific challenges faced by domestic workers. Additionally, provisions such as compulsory employer registration, clear guidelines on wage security, defined employment terms, effective grievance redressal mechanisms, and meaningful e-Shram registration—beyond its largely symbolic value for many domestic workers—are essential to provide tangible and immediate protections in their everyday employment circumstances.

It must be noted that a few Indian states have made early but significant attempts. Tamil Nadu’s Domestic Workers Welfare Board Act, 2007, and the Maharashtra’s Domestic Workers Welfare Board Act, 2008, try to grant social security, medical assistance, and schemes of welfare through state boards. These efforts, though significant, suffer serious constraints in reach, implementation, and funding. Registration is still voluntary in most instances, enforcement officers are weakly empowered, and employers readily dodge accountability, invoking the privacy of homes. Delhi’s recent Domestic Workers Regulation of Work and Social Security Bill, 2022, which is still in a draft stage and has not been enacted into law, provides a more comprehensive legislative cover. It provides for mandatory registration of domestic workers, employers, and service providers; prescribes regulations on wages, working hours, leave, and termination; and sets up district-level welfare boards and grievance redressal forums. The Bill further criminalizes child domestic work and provides penalties for default, discrimination, and sexual harassment and thus seeks to balance regulation with rights-based safeguards. Yet, state-level interventions are mostly patchy and inconsistent in legal definitions, employer responsibilities, and grievance redressals. The patchwork results in jurisdictional complexity and limited portability of benefits for workers who move from one state to another in search of employment.

The core demand from domestic workers’ unions, NGOs, and civil society organizations has been the enactment of a central, comprehensive law recognizing domestic workers as full-fledged workers under India’s labour jurisprudence. There is an urgent need to define “domestic work” and “domestic worker” comprehensively, encompassing part-time, full-time, live-in, migrant, and gig-based app-mediated domestic work arrangements. Without such clarity, enforcement remains erratic and subject to wide administrative and policy discretion.

There is also a pressing need to create a regime of employer registration and accountability. Currently, the lack of formal contracts between domestic employers and household workers results in undetermined terms of employment, vagueness in wage rates, leave benefits, and work hours, and subjects workers to personal caprice. Formal contracts that specify these conditions are essential for the legal enforceability of rights. In addition, state and national welfare boards with allocated funds need to be established so that benefits like maternity benefits, pensions, health insurance, and education scholarships are transferable across states and employment shifts so that workers have the mobility they need for livelihoods without sacrificing their entitlements.

The present lack of official grievance redressal system greatly disenfranchises domestic workers from upholding their rights. There is an urgent need for institutionally established fast-track grievance redressal mechanisms, grievance boards, and tripartite dispute settlement forums accessible with ease, free from police influence, and with significant representation from domestic workers’ organisations and unions.The Local Complaints Committees (LCCs) that are the initial contact for sexual harassment cases should also be mobilized and activated in their full function. Such mechanisms need to have the legal teeth to force compliance and effectively correct exploitation.

However, attempts to legally regularize domestic work meet with considerable opposition from several directions. Employers in domestic settings, representing India’s growing middle and upper classes, consider such regulation intrusive into private households and cost-additive.The private household is seen as a non-workplace, making enforcement and inspection more difficult, and both legally and socially creating opposition. The fractured and informal nature of domestic work, with its short-term arrangements and highly personal work relationships, makes state-led enforcement even more challenging. Piling onto this, several Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), which are non-governmental and voluntary, act as self-regulatory organizations in housing societies, have placed discriminatory limitations on domestic workers restricting their access, movement, and rights in residential areas, thereby fostering exclusion and marginalization.Placement agencies and app-based operators, serving as middlemen in the sourcing and deployment of domestic workers, are mostly unregulated and stand to gain from the current legal loophole. Any attempt at regulation would require licensing, transparency, and responsibility on their part, much of which is met with resistance.

International instruments such as the ILO Convention 189, 2011 provide advancing standards for domestic workers’ rights. The convention recognizes domestic work, imposes minimum wage, workplace safety conditions, and incorporates social protection. India was a vote in favor of adopting it in 2011 but has yet to ratify it.Several nations, like South Africa, Brazil, and certain other nations in Africa, such as Namibia, Mauritius, and Seychelles, have embraced strong legal protections for domestic workers, typically borrowing from the model developed by ILO Convention 189. Yet beyond the difficulties of any multicultural country, India’s socio-economic context, characterized by strongly ingrained caste hierarchies, patriarchy, and a huge informal economy, complicates wholesale emulation of such models especially. These converging realities call for a sensitively nuanced legal response that is attuned to India’s particular circumstances while being able to draw upon and modify international norms.

Domestic workers’ collectives and trade unions have spearheaded this struggle for legal protection and recognition. Organizations such as National Domestic Workers Movement (NDWM), All India Domestic Workers Union, and collectives at the state level have been engaged in mobilizing workers, influencing policy debates, and proposing legislative drafts. Their movement is premised on demands for a countrywide law that provides universal legal safeguards, formal registration processes, enforceable agreements, access to social security resources, health and maternity benefits, and severe punishment for violations such as sexual harassment, trafficking, and child labor.

Non-governmental organizations like ActionAid Association, SEWA, and others have been key in closing the gap between domestic workers and state institutions. They help with registration of workers, identity documents, legal assistance, skill development schemes, and legal literacy campaigns, serving as intermediaries that push workers’ concerns to the policy arena. Illustrating intensifying grassroots mobilization. One such recent action includes, Paschim Banga Griha Paricharika Samity (PGPS) conducting a convention at Moulali Yuba Kendra, Kolkata, for social dignity and legal identity by advocating the passing of a holistic Domestic Workers Act on 16th June 2025 marking International Domestic Workers’ Day. In parallel, academic and research constituencies continue to chart systemic abuses, evaluate current welfare arrangements, and generate evidence-based policy advice that informs legal reform.

For young lawyers and legal practitioners alike, this new legal frontier presents useful opportunities for intervention and reform. The Supreme Court’s recent comment, encouraging unions and stakeholders to launch legal frameworks for domestic workers, mirrors increasing judicial appreciation for the legislative gap. In January 2024, four ministries — labour, social justice, women and child development, and law and justice — were asked by the Court to constitute a joint committee to consider a legal framework. Public interest litigation can question domestic workers’ exclusion from labour laws under constitutional provisions of equality, dignity, and life. Policy advocacy enables lawyers to be involved in preparing legal frameworks and advising unions. Legal education has the power to enable workers to assert their rights, and representation in wage grievances and wrongful dismissals can affect lives directly. Women lawyers, in particular, can offer both expertise and solidarity to a largely female workforce.Through pro bono cases, legal consciousness-raising campaigns, and being accessible to workers who frequently fear formal mechanisms, new lawyers can build meaningful access to justice. Legal clinics and collaborations with civil society enable them to operate at the intersection of policy, law, and social justice.

This lack of special legislation and policy extending to domestic workers indicates the extremely entrenched social hierarchies, gendered expectations, and class prejudices within the nation. Domestic work remains perceived, not as formal labor but as private service provided within domestic homes, often with connotations of paternalism or feudalism.Class biases also deepen this marginalization, where domestic workers are more likely considered inferior and replaceable, perpetuating uneven power relations between employers and workers. This view excludes a large number of women, most of whom are Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, and migrant, from their deserving position in the economic and legal hierarchy of the country. Amendment to the law by itself will not be able to eradicate these deep-seated social formations completely, but it is an unavoidable pre-condition for change. Detailed legislation, backed by effective enforcement, accountable institutional arrangements, and a requisite shift in the social values, together has to shatter the long-standing invisibility and vulnerability that define domestic work in India

As India aspires towards economic leadership and global stature, its domestic workers cannot be an unseen force fueling this growth behind the scenes. The moral, constitutional, and legal imperatives are clear. International Domestic Workers’ Day will have real meaning in India only when its legal framework complies fully with seeing domestic workers as integral players in the country’s workforce, entitled to dignity, rights, and justice.