Supreme Court Recognises the Economic Value of Homemakers Unpaid Work

The Supreme Court has taken an important step in recognising the economic worth of the unpaid work done by homemakers. In a case arising from a road accident in Haryana in 2001, a tribunal had first awarded a family compensation of about 2.42 lakh rupees for the death of a woman. The Supreme Court has now raised that amount to about 62.77 lakh rupees. A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N. Kotiswar Singh said the change reflects a long-standing failure of compensation law to value unpaid domestic labour. The court described homemakers as nation builders who deserve to be recognised as such.

Under the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, the family of a person killed in a road accident is entitled to compensation. The calculation is mostly mathematical. A court takes the income of the deceased, deducts a share for personal expenses, adds a percentage for future prospects, and multiplies the result by a number based on the person's age. For a salaried person there are payslips and tax returns, but for a homemaker there is no such record. To deal with this, courts have used the idea of notional income, a figure assigned to recognise that domestic work has value even when it is unpaid.

The court explained that earlier judgments had already accepted, in principle, that a homemaker's work is valuable and cannot be treated as equal to that of a paid helper. However, the actual figures used remained low and did not capture the full contribution a homemaker makes to a household every day. The bench referred to the National Statistical Office's Time Use Survey of 2019, which found that women aged 15 to 59 spend over seven hours daily on unpaid domestic work, against under three hours for men. It noted estimates that women's unpaid caregiving contributes around 15 to 17 percent of India's GDP, a value that does not appear in official figures because unpaid work is not counted as productive.

To close this gap, the court created a new head of compensation called loss of domestic care, with a base value of 30,000 rupees per month. This amount now acts as the starting monthly income for a homemaker, to which future prospects are added and the age-based multiplier is applied. Where a homemaker also did paid work, the 30,000 rupees is added to her actual income. This base figure is to be raised by 10 percent every three years. The court kept this separate from loss of consortium, which deals mainly with emotional loss such as companionship and comfort, rather than the economic value of running a household.

The judgment is significant because it gives courts a clearer method to value domestic labour, instead of relying only on low notional income figures. By treating homemakers as both caregivers and economic actors, the ruling brings compensation law closer to reflecting the real worth of unpaid work in the home.