Hyderabad: Most households in the city, especially the upper middle class sections, rely heavily on their domestic helps, who attend to their everyday chores and provide respite, irrespective of the misery they are going through.
Most of the helps are either single mothers or the family’s lone bread-earners.
A silver lining for these impoverished women comes in the form of some social organisations, which are working on ways and means to transform this unorganised sector into an orderly sector where every domestic help will be entitled to benefits like medical treatments. The Union government has been since 2010, albeit at a sluggish pace, trying to implement minimum wages, weekly off, health and insurance cover, maternity benefits, legal protection and pension for them.
According to the estimates of Telangana Domestic Workers’ Union (TDWU), of the 7.6 million workers in India, around nine to ten lakh are in Telangana state with Hyderabad accounting for up to five lakh. These domestic workers are categorised as full-time, part-time, living in servant quarters and migrants.
It should be noted that many women organizations have been pressuring the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to make the life of domestic help better.
Some domestic workers from the city said that their family depends on their income as their husbands are alcoholics. Some said that they cannot even take a day’s leave, even if they are unwell.
A worst societal bane is that when something is missing from the house, these workers are the first suspects and are sent to the police station. This is despite their tack-record as trustworthy employees. In most of the cases, it is the family members who misplace the ‘lost’ material.
The helps bear the trauma and torture in silence for fear of losing the job.
