In The Census of 2001 it appears that those who are doing household duties like cooking, cleaning of utensils, looking after children, fetching water, collecting firewood have been categorized as non-workers and equated with beggars etc.,
Women are generally engaged in home making bringing up children and also in production of goods and services which are not sold in the market but are consumed at the household level. Thus, the work of women mostly goes unrecognized and they are never valued. It is well known fact that women make significant contribution at various levels including agricultural production by sowing, harvesting, transplanting and also tending cattles and by cooking and delivering the food to those persons who are on the field du ring the agriculature season.
India is a signatory to the said Convention and ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Convention on 9th July, 1993. But even then no law has been made for proper evaluation of the household work by women as homemakers.
The UNICEF in 2000, noted that “unpaid care work is the foundation of human experience”. The care work is that which is done by a woman as a mother and definitely in India, the woman herself will be the last person to give this role an economic value given the social concept of the role of the mother.
The case cited by the Madras High Court is extracted below:
“….. that there have been efforts to understand the value of a homemaker’s unpaid labour by different methods. One is, the opportunity cost which evaluates her wages by assessing what she would have earned had she not remained at home, viz., the opportunity lost. The second is, the partnership method which assumes that a marriage is an equal economic partnership and in this method, the homemaker’s salary is valued at half her husband’s salary. Yet another method is to evaluate homemaking by determining how much it would cost to replace the homemaker with paid workers. This is called the Replacement Method.
The role of housewife includes managing budgets, coordinating activities, balancing accounts, helping children with education, managing help at home, nursing care etc. One formula that has been arrived at determines the value of the housewife as,
Value of housewife = Husband’s income – wife’s income + value of husband’s household services,
Which means the wife’s value wil increase inversely proportionate to the extent of participation by the husband in the household duties.
The Constitution of Cambodia, Article 36 provides as under;
The work by housewives in the home shall have the same value as what they can receive when working outside the home.
It has to be recognized that the services produced in the home by the women for other members of the household are an important and valuable form of production. It is possible to put monetary value to the services as for instance, the monetary value of cooking for family members could be assessed in terms of what it would cost to hire a cook or to purchase ready cooked food or by assessing how much money could be earned if the food cooked for the family were to be sold in the locality.
Household work performed by women throughout India is more than US $ 612.8 billion per year (Evangelical Social Action Forum and Health Bridge, page 17).
So, when compared to Housewives work performance, planning, futuristic the work performed by the husband from 9.00 a.m to 5.30 p.m is very very less.
We should complete the work within the schedule and leave the office to help her in all and with a lot of love they will do a lot of support to you.
VANDEE MATHARAM, BHARAT MATH KI JAI
CAclubindia
