As mentioned above, domestic work operates as informal work in India. It is estimated that 83.6% of people of working age are in informal employment and 67.5% of people total are engaged in the informal work sector, constituting both large numbers of men and women (ILO, 2012b). In India, salaries from informal work are significantly lower than in formal sectors. Evidence shows that female wages in the informal work sector are four times lower than female wages in the formal work sector (Das, Jain-chandra, Kochhar, & Kumar, 2015).
A substantial proportion of young domestic workers in Delhi have migrated from rural areas where income and education opportunities are scarce (Neetha, 2004). The increased demand for young female domestic workers in urban areas, has resulted in an increase in informal recruitment channels. These are mostly operated by placement agencies, which recruit young females from rural areas to work as domestic workers in urban households.
Being informal, these placement agencies work in clandestine and unregulated ways, which poses additional risks to the wellbeing of domestic workers (Samantroy, 2014). The government has introduced efforts in cities like Delhi, such as the Private Placement Agencies (Regulation) Order, which was presented by the state government of NCT of Delhi in 2014, to regulate private placement agencies and protect domestic workers (Samantroy, 2014).
However, due to inconsistencies regarding age definition of domestic workers and scope of the regulations, the Order is still under development by the state government of NCT of Delhi.
Domestic work, as well as child domestic work, has received increased policy attention in India due to, for example, global discussions around the ILO Convention No. 189 and India’s consideration of ratifying this convention. Therefore, an increased number of NGOs and actors have entered the field of child and adult domestic work. During my fieldwork for this study, I became aware of the competitive nature among the NGOs and actors relevant for CDWs, as there was, along with the increased attention, more funding at stake.
One example of the increased policy attention for domestic work is the skills training project, Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), initiated by the state government of the National Capital Region (NCR) in 2014 (National Skill Development Agency (NSDA), 2014). The skills training project is an attempt to formalise the work force of domestic work and to recognise that domestic work requires certain skills, which would be both valuable for the workers as well as a guarantee of quality for the employers. The RPL targeted 920 adult domestic workers in total in the NCR of Delhi (M. Sharma, 2016).
In India, age coverage is the primary focus of the child labour discourse regarding the recent amendments to the Child Labour Act, as described in the previous section. The strong voices of the NGOs are lobbying for the Child Labour Act to be amended to concern all children under the age of 18 in line with the UNCRC rather than the minimum working age of 14. For example, one influential voice who advocates for age amendments of the Child Labour Act is the 2014 Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, founder of the organisation Bachpan Bachao
Andolan (BBA).5 Satyarthi’s standpoint is that poverty is not the driving push factor in India for child labour, instead demand for cheap labour and unemployed parents are the main reasons to child labour in India (Satyarthi, 2015). In an article published in the Times of India, Satyarthi provides several points for why the Child Labour Act shall include children aged 15 to 18. For example, he argues that: ’Children are not aware of their rights, are easily mislead and are too young to speak against their conditions, but our laws permit employers to exploit these hapless souls’ (Satyarthi, 2015).6 The opposing side, often voiced by childhood scholars, suggests that it is not feasible to increase the Child Labour Act to 18 with the main argument that NGOs in India mainly base their positions on Minority World’s conceptualisations of childhood, which do not reflect the reality of children in India. Wadia, for example, argues that NGOs in India are undermining and neglecting the needs of the majority of India’s children because their missions are based on the UNCRC (Wadia, 2011).
Wadia instead suggests that childhood studies in India must problematize how childhood is conceptualised among actors who address the needs of children. Wadia further recommends that efforts targeted towards children must also explore what the effect dominant childhood discourses in India have on children’s lives, instead of solely focusing on age (Wadia, 2011).
I further witnessed the different viewpoints regarding age coverage of domestic workers during the workshop, as mentioned in the previous section, on the draft bill ‘Domestic Workers Regulation of Work and Social Security Bill, 2016’ organised by the NDWP in Delhi in 2016. The draft bill included, prior to the workshop, the definition of a child as anyone below 18 years of age. However, the participants (a large number of whom were domestic workers) agreed during the workshop that the age had to be changed from 18 to 15 to reflect the reality of the majority of the workers in India (National Platform for Domestic Workers, 2016).
As shown in this section, multiple organisations and actors are operating in the field of child domestic work in India. However, these organisations and actors are often working in isolation and are only consistent with the international standards such as the ILO Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour and the UNCRC. To date, there are no unified
5 See for example this article published on the 27th of May 2015 in the Economic Times:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/changes-in-child-labour-law-acceptable-if-children-work-with-parents-kailash-satyarthi/articleshow/47436139.cms
6 Retrieved from: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/no-half-measures-please/
efforts to improve the situation of young female domestic workers that acknowledge their rights to adequate protection from potential abuse and violations of their fundamental human rights as workers.