NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court said that the work a homemaker does every day — like cooking, cleaning, raising children and caring for the elderly — has real economic value. In cases where a homemaker dies in a road accident, her family must now receive higher compensation that reflects this value. The court fixed a minimum of Rs 30,000 per month as the worth of a homemaker’s contribution to the family.What was the case about?A woman from Haryana died in a road accident in November 2001. Her husband and children went to court seeking compensation. The local tribunal gave them Rs 2,42,000, after which they approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which took twenty years to increase it to Rs 8,43,400, partly because the case file was destroyed in a court fire in 2011. The family felt even this was too little and approached the Supreme Court. A bench of Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Nongmeikapam Kotiswar Singh ultimately awarded them Rs 62.7 lakh.What did the court say about homemakers?The court said that we often call a homemaker “dependent” on the earning member of the family. But that is backwards. It said, “In reality the household’s functioning depends substantially on the homemaker. The earning members are in fact solely dependent on the homemaker.”It further pointed out that Indian women spend over seven hours every day on unpaid household work, which is more than double what men do. This invisible work, the court said, contributes an estimated 15–17 per cent of India’s GDP, yet it is never counted, never paid and rarely acknowledged.Courts had been calculating compensation for a homemaker’s death using very low “notional income” figures — sometimes as little as Rs 3,000 per month from rulings two decades old. The court said this was deeply unfair.It has now created a new category called “loss of domestic care” — a way of putting a rupee value on everything a homemaker does for her family. This will be calculated at Rs 30,000 per month as a starting figure and will increase by 10 per cent every three years to keep pace with rising costs.This amount covers three things the family loses when a homemaker dies: someone to run the home, a mother’s guidance for the children, and a wife’s support for her husband.The bench also expressed serious concern about how long accident compensation cases take. Looking at over 120 such cases, it found that in nearly half of them, families had waited more than four years just at the High Court level. On average, cases took eight years in High Courts and six years before tribunals. The court directed High Court Chief Justices to fast-track the oldest pending cases and consider setting up more benches for such matters.The bench further added that the word “housewife” does not do justice to what these women do. It directed that homemakers should now be called “Nation Builders” — because that is exactly what they are.
