Domestic Workers - Law and Legal Provisions in India

Abstract

This paper is written on a very new and immerging issue of domestic workers and their exploitation in India. The language of the paper has been kept very simple and descriptive so that even a layman who does not have much sense of Indian laws can understand and comprehend the difficult aspects of present domestic laws without any difficulty. The paper will start with an overview to discuss the post-independent situation of workers and the laws that were brought in by the legislators to vanish the Indian societal problem of Jameedari system. Following overview, paper will move to a general introduction of the word “Domestic workers” and will try to give simplest definition of the term in Indian context and will try to exemplify the situation of domestic workers under three heads: - WHAT, HOW AND WHY and it will illustrate the situation of domestic workers and their relation to care economy and unrecognised sector.In its third part paper will try to show the dismal situation of law for protection of domestic workers in present scenario. It will also talk about the recent developments made for protection of domestic workers in India. Under this head, paper will discuss mainly about different statutes, Justice J.S. Verma Committee’s report, Pending bills, Task force report, National Advisory Council’s report, International Labour Organization’s convention C 189 for domestic workers and various other cases.towards the end, the paper will be concluded with some remarks and suggestions to the government of India. The conclusion will take optimistic approach to deal with the existing problems.