Unpaid toil of housewives
by
AJ Philip |
It’s high time to remove discrimination
BEHIND every successful man, there is a woman. Thus goes a popular saying. Yet, it is seldom that she gets accolades for the success of her man. And when it comes to paying compliments to their wives, men are often parsimonious, though there are persons like nonagenarian Congress leader K. Karunakaran whose autobiography Patharathe Munnottu (Ahead, Unwaveringly) bristles with tributes to his wife the late Kalyanikutti Amma.
Women themselves are, to some extent, responsible for the low esteem in which they are held. The other day, my wife talked to a classmate of hers after nearly 37 years, i.e., ever since they left the college. She demeaned herself when she said she did nothing in her life as she was only a homemaker, taking care of her husband and children. “Is bringing up two children, who are doing well in life, a small thing?” asked my wife, who has a five-day 10 to 6 job. It is a well-known secret that in India, a job does not liberate a woman from the responsibilities at home.
A Malayalam movie Veruthe oru bhaarya (Just a wife) depicts the daily routine of a homemaker, who is constantly taunted by her husband, a government employee, for doing “precious little”. When she leaves him for a few days following a bitter quarrel, he realises for once the value of her work, though pride and prejudice prevent him from admitting it and he becomes a psychotic shutting out the world.
This happens mainly because the work that a homemaker does – cooking food, keeping the house tidy, washing clothes, preparing children for school and helping them do their homework – can never be quantified and is, therefore, not valued.
Unfortunately, even government institutions treat homemakers with more contempt than respect. In the last census (2001), homemakers were categorised as “non-workers” and clubbed with beggars, prostitutes and prisoners who are “not engaged in economically productive work”. Come to think of it, this classification happens in a country which is headed by a woman President, Pratibha Singh Patil, and whose politics is controlled by another woman, Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Little has been done to ameliorate the condition of women in this regard. Finally, it required the initiative of the Supreme Court to address this problem in a frontal manner. What provoked the court to think aloud on the subject was a case that came up before it as a result of the death of a homemaker in a road accident in Uttar Pradesh.
When it came to determining the compensation to be paid to the woman’s husband, the insurance company went by the rule book. Compensation is always determined on how much the person would have earned if he were alive. Thus a person with a higher salary gets a higher compensation than someone with a lower salary. But in the case of the homemaker, her income is assessed as one-third of the income of her husband and compensation is fixed accordingly.
In doing so, no consideration is given to the fact that a homemaker also produces goods and services, which are consumed within the family and are not sold in the market. For instance, the value of the food a woman cooks or the coaching she provides to her children is never taken into account.
In the case in question, the husband challenged the compensation of Rs 250,000 awarded to him, which he found inadequate, given the value of the work she did. He approached the apex court when his appeal was turned down by the Allahabad High Court, which, again, went by the rule book. In a trail-blazing judgment, the highest court of the land said “it is highly unfair, unjust and inappropriate to compute the compensation payable to the dependents of a deceased wife/mother, who does not have regular income, by comparing her services with that of a housekeeper or a servant or an employee who works for a fixed period.
“The gratuitous services rendered by wife/mother to the husband and children cannot be equated with the services of an employee and no evidence of data can possibly be produced for estimating the value of such services”. In saying so, it increased the compensation to Rs600,000 with a six per cent interest on the amount from the date of filing the petition to the date of payment. He was also given Rs50,000 towards the cost of litigation.
Justice has been done in this case but for millions of women whose services go unrecognised and undervalued, the future is bleak unless Parliament takes the call. In fact, the court has asked the lawmakers of the country to take steps that will redeem the constitutional guarantee that there will be no discrimination on the basis of sex.
On the same day the verdict was given, the apex court disappointed countless people when it turned down the appeal of the National Commission for Women (NCW) in a rape case.
One Ashok Rai raped his girl student following which she committed suicide. He was punished and sent to jail from where he appeared for the prestigious civil services examination and got selected to the Indian Administrative Service. Because he qualified for the service, the Delhi High Court ordered his release, though he had completed only five and a half years in jail, while the minimum punishment for rape is seven years. The Supreme Court refused to consider the appeal on the ground that the government, not the NCW, should have filed it.
The question that arises is: Can brilliance substitute for character? What happens if he continues to be as insensitive in government as he was with his girl student? Somber thoughts on the same day the same court struck a blow for women’s rights!
Oman Tribune |
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