This week, the Supreme Court put a floor under the value of a homemaker’s labour: a minimum of Rs 30,000 a month. The loss of “domestic care” when a homemaker dies or is incapacitated in a road accident, the bench of Justice Sanjay Karol and N K Singh held, is a distinct injury to the family, deserving compensation in its own right. The court noted what economists have long documented: women’s unpaid care work contributes an estimated 15-17% of India’s GDP, yet remains invisible. The bench also called homemakers “nation builders”: a eulogy that I will return to.

The judgment is the latest milestone in a quietly progressive strand of Indian jurisprudence. In Jan 2021, the Supreme Court in Kirti v Oriental Insurance held that a homemaker’s notional income must be seriously computed in accident claims, with Justice N V Ramana observing that this recognises the labour of millions of women. In June 2023, Madras high court went further. Justice Krishnan Ramasamy, in Kannaian Naidu v Kamsala Ammal, ruled that a wife who “toils as a homemaker” is entitled to an equal share in assets standing in her husband’s name, because his ability to go out and earn rested on her unpaid labour at home. Hers, the judge noted, is a 24-hour job without holidays; it cannot be ranked below the husband’s eight-hour one.

The numbers behind these judgments are stark. India’s Time Use Survey shows women spend close to five hours a day on unpaid domestic work, against barely half an hour for men — among the most unequal divisions in the world. This burden is the single biggest barrier to women’s paid work in India, and it shapes the terms of re-entry: later, lower, for less.

When Kamal Haasan’s party promised “salaries for housewives” before the 2021 Tamil Nadu elections, I argued in these pages against the idea. My objection stands. A monthly wage for housework — paid by the husband or by the state — takes the male-breadwinner family as a given and sets it in concrete. It converts an unjust division of labour into a permanent job description. It would deepen women’s dependence, not reduce it: a salary routed through the household would, in most Indian homes, not be under the woman’s own control. And it says nothing about the real issue — that men share the work.

So, are the courts doing what I argued against? No, and the distinction is the difference between pocket money and power. Wages for housework would pay women to stay where they are. The courts are instead recognising the value of women’s unpaid labour at the point where entitlements are decided. Madras high court did not order husbands to pay their wives a salary. It said the house, the land, the savings that accumulate during a marriage are joint products of his employment and her labour, and she owns half. That is not a wage; that is a property right. Ownership gives women what a salary never could: a claim independent of the husband’s goodwill, bargaining power within the marriage, and a viable exit from a bad one.

Now, about the halo. Courts and politicians alike reach for the language of veneration: homemakers as nation builders, mothers as goddesses, the home as the woman’s temple. This is precisely the vocabulary conservative voices deploy to sanctify women’s confinement to the home. They glorify the pedestal, and no one asks why she cannot step off it. Women do not cook and clean out of patriotism; they do it because an unequal division of labour leaves them little choice. These judgments matter for the entitlements they create — compensation and property shares — not for the eulogies that accompany them.

The limits are also clear. Recognition that arrives only when a woman dies in an accident, or when a marriage ends in litigation, is recognition deferred — a posthumous audit of a lifetime of work. And as Justice Ramasamy himself noted, no Indian law yet recognises a wife’s contribution to matrimonial property; he could rule as he did, but another judge may not.

That is the unfinished agenda. Parliament should codify what the courts have begun: a matrimonial property law treating marriage as an equal economic partnership. Women who keep family farms and firms running — while being counted as ‘not working’ — must be recognised as workers with a claim on the earnings. Public investment in childcare and eldercare must shift the load off women’s shoulders, instead of pricing it there.

The courts have stopped pretending that housework is a labour of love with no economic worth. The harder task is ours: to stop believing it is women’s work. The most radical valuation of housework is not a number a judge fixes after a tragedy, nor a halo — it is a husband doing half of it, unremarked, on an ordinary Tuesday.

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