Aasmeen is a domestic worker who lives in Haiderpur hut colony in Delhi. Her day starts at 5 am when she still has a lot of sleep left in her eyes but must somehow raise herself from her bed. After all she has to leave for work at 9.
Before this she must clean up her own home and cook too for her 7 member family. Then she takes a bus to reach her place of employment about 5 km. away. Here she has to carry out cleaning and washing work for four households. She finishes the first round by about 1 pm.
Then she goes to the nearest park to eat the modest lunch she has brought with her. This very short rest period also becomes difficult on rainy days and on very hot days. During the recent heat wave conditions this rest time became more of a punishing time as she had to endure really terrible exposure to heat when she sat in the open.
After the short lunch break the work round starts again. By the time she reaches home after finishing the second round it is often over 4 pm. Now she needs to look after her own family needs and look after her children.
In recent times the intensely hot weather did not allow her any proper rest even at night time. What is more, there is a very serious water shortage in the colony where she lives and so the family has to fetch water from a tap which is some distance away. This has to be done as early as 3 to 4 am, as otherwise they won’t get their turn at the tap. So Aasmeen has to worry about fetching water even so late at night, even though children help in this work.
Many of these problems peaked during the recent heat waves, as everyone in the family was having more frequent health problems. Speaking for herself, she says that she has several body pains but during the heat waves things were worse than this. As she tells, she often felt that there is no energy or life left in the body at times, but yet she had to somehow pull herself out of this and attend to her ‘normal’ work.
Although she works very hard to keep her employers satisfied, the payment she gets is very small. All her earnings from four households add up to just Rs. 6000 or so in a month, she says. She realizes of course that what she is being paid is very less, but in the absence of any better alternatives that she knows, she continues this work which enables her to make some contribution to the bringing up of her children.
Her husband works even harder as a loader at a fruit market, carrying heavy loads, often in ways that may be risky for his health. What is more he has to leave as early as 3 am as a lot of fruit supplies on trucks reach the market very early in the morning. For all this work, he is able to earn Rs. 700 or 800 per day.
A big regret of Aasmeen is that she is unable to give adequate time to her family. It is very difficult for me to get a holiday, she adds.
While her life is a life of relentless grind, in the case of some other domestic workers who travel longer distances the situation is even more difficult. This is particularly true of hut dwellers who were relocated to more distant areas and not getting employment at new places, they keep coming to serve the households they had served earlier even though now they are living far away. In the case of several households resettled in Bawana, several women domestic workers now travel about 25 km. daily (up and down) to serve in the old areas. So they have to leave very early and return late, spending almost the entire day in work which continues to be very poorly paid.
In these distressing conditions clearly it is very important to enact legislation to ensure fair earnings and various welfare benefits for domestic workers, something that has been pending for a long time.
Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071.
