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Respect, Status and Domestic Work: Female Migrants at Home and Work

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Abstract

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a complex and often contradictory process for female, ethnic minority, migrant strangers, moving as domestic workers to Delhi, India's capital. Drawing on empirical work in a village in Jharkhand state, which has witnessed increasing migration of adolescent girls as domestic workers to Delhi over the last two decades, this article highlights the experience of tribal domestic workers at home and at work. It points to their agency in dealing with the contradictions they face between earning incomes, acquiring markers of status and gaining respect across the urban and rural worlds they straddle.

Le passage de l’adolescence à l’âge adulte est un processus complexe et souvent contradictoire pour les jeunes femmes de minorités ethniques migrant à Delhi – la capitale de l’Inde – pour y travailler en tant que travailleuses domestiques. Ce travail s’appuie sur une étude empirique menée dans un village de l’État du Jharkhand, qui connaît depuis deux décennies une augmentation du nombre des adolescentes migrant vers Delhi pour y trouver du travail en tant qu’employées domestiques. Il décrit le vécu, chez elles et au travail, de ces jeunes femmes d’origine tribale et met en évidence les manières dont elles affrontent les contradictions entre la nécessité de gagner des revenus, d’acquérir un statut et de gagner le respect des mondes urbain et rural qu’elles côtoient.

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Notes

  1. All names used in the article have been changed.

  2. See Molyneux (1979), Folbre (1994) and other contributors to the domestic labour debate.

  3. The System of National Accounts (SNA) was revised in 1993 to include subsistence work and unpaid, home-based or self-employed work (Hirway, 2005). The production of services, defined as the preparation of meals, laundry, cleaning, shopping, care of children, the elderly and sick, and volunteer services, continued to be excluded.

  4. Women paid domestic workers, both full- and part-time, doubled from around 1.25 million in 1995 to over 3 million in 2004–2005 (Neetha, 2009).

  5. An analysis of the National Sample Survey data by education level shows that while at post-secondary levels of education, women's employment has been stable at approximately 12–13 per cent in urban areas, there has been a rapid expansion for women with less than primary levels of education in ‘low-paid jobs, often in a subsidiary capacity, in the service sector, in schools and hospitals or as domestic help in households’ (Unni and Raveendran, 2007, p. 197). Micro studies confirm this (Sudarshan and Bhattacharya, 2009).

  6. Jharkhand state has a relatively large proportion of tribal population, locally referring to themselves as adivasis. The south-western parts, consisting of Simdega, Gumla and Ranchi Districts, provide the largest number of domestic workers to Delhi. They also have a strong network of missionary schools and long-standing missionary activity.

  7. Delhi Police has licensed 650 domestic help agencies, but according to recent NGO reports, there are 1200 registered and 2650 illegal domestic help agencies in Delhi (Karan Choudhury, Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 27 February 2011, p. 3).

  8. 1 GBP=Rs 72.3, so Rs 1200=GBP 16.5, as on 12 March 2011.

  9. Seventy-five per cent of male migrants were over 18, but nearly half of the female migrants were not yet 18.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based on research funded by the Development Research Centre on Globalisation, Migration and Poverty entitled ‘Gender Differences in Migration Opportunities, Educational Choices and Wellbeing Outcomes’. Thanks to Shrayana Bhattacharya for research support, and Ann Whitehead, Mina Swaminathan and participants at the University of Warwick conference on Waged Domestic Work, May 2008, for detailed comments on an earlier draft. My thanks also to Amit Mitra for extensive comments on previous drafts of this article and for sharing insights from his ongoing research on migration, and to Laura Camfield and the two anonymous reviewers for helping strengthen the article.

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Rao, N. Respect, Status and Domestic Work: Female Migrants at Home and Work. Eur J Dev Res 23, 758–773 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2011.41

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