On June 6, 2024, when her home was demolished, Darshana’s employers had permitted her a couple of days off work to deal with the disruption her life had faced. However, three days later, she received a phone call from them, asking her to return to work. “Woh boli ‘agar tum nahi aayi, dusre bai ko lagaungi’ ”.  (She told me that if I don’t come back, they will keep some other bai, and I will be out of a job),  Darshana shared. “Unko adjust nahi ho raha tha. Woh boli dusre bai logg wapis aa gaye…Boli ‘bhaade mein room le lo aur aa jao kaam pe’. Aasan thodi hai! (She said she wasn’t able to adjust and that all the other bai logg had returned to work, so I must also. She just said, ‘Quickly rent a room or something somewhere, and come back,’ as if it is an easy thing to do.)

Despite this, Darshana maintains that her ‘madam’ is good and one of the nicer ones. When her neighbour, Jaya returned to work two days after the demolition, she was asked to leave as her employer had “kept” someone else. “Woh batayi, ‘ghar ka thikana nahi, kaam kaise karogi? Ghar dekh lo, phir kaam pe aana’. 2000 de ke nikaal diya.” (She told me, ‘You have no home, how will you work? First figure your home situation out, and then go back to work’, and saying this, she paid me Rs. 2000 and removed me from work.) Two weeks later, Jaya felt lucky to find another job at a different building, which paid half of her previous job. Many, many other women in the basti have faced similar job loss, after already facing the destruction of their homes. Many of them have not been able to procure another job yet. They yearn for the meagre 2000-4000 per month, as it would have been better than the debilitating lack of income they face now.

In this moment of pronounced systemic injustice, the regular and everyday uncertainty of the nature of their livelihoods as domestic workers—which offers none of the rights justly exercised by their white-collar employers or those in the organised sector—is made clearer. Domestic work is not part of the statutory employment list, leaving them outside the ambit of basic worker protections such as minimum wages, paid leaves, collective bargaining, workplace safety, ESI/Provident Fund, annual bonus, and so on.

The imagined separation of the home as the woman’s abode of unpaid labour and the world outside as that of the productive male bread-earner is a patriarchal myth used by the capitalist mode of production. Recognising the home as a place of work is a struggle against the public – private gendered division of work. Most women domestic workers do not have any written contract specifying the exact services being bought, with many unpaid tasks being extracted. They can be terminated without serving any notice period. Even when the Maharashtra government recently set up the Gharelu Kamgar Kalyan Mandal, a welfare board envisioned by a 2008 state law, it clearly avoided recognising domestic work as ‘work’. Roughly ten thousand of the fifteen lakh domestic workers estimated to be working in Maharashtra’s major cities are covered by this welfare measure to provide one-time cash transfers for maternity and old age. As a result, workers are either left to the employer or State’s dole or benevolence, as worthy recipients of charity, or criminalised as “suspicious elements” in the city. It is not uncommon to find false cases of theft being lodged when workers demand basic rights, even facing violence and sexual abuse at the hands of the employers.

The women of Jai Bhim Nagar, who work in similar gated colonies, face distinct shades of this continued violence. They recount their experiences of being thoroughly screened at the gates of the buildings upon their entry and departure. “Guard purse mein haath dal kar check karte, dekhte hai kitna paisa hai, kya kya hai. Aur exit ke time, wapis check karte. Jab paghar milta hai, madam ko gate paas likhna padta hai.”(The guards put their hands inside our purses when we go in, and make a list of all of the items and money in it. When we return, they check again, to make sure that it is the same. When we get paid, our madams have to write us a gate-pass to allow us to take our salary home) shares Sarita, who recognises the implicit discrimination inherent in these routine practices. Jaya shares a similar anecdote, following up with the request to not have her real name mentioned, “Madam-sir dekh liye toh, unke groups mein daal denge ki hum kaise hai, aur phir koi nahi rakhega,” (If my sir and madam find out I am saying this, they will remove me and tell all the other houses not to keep me). She laments that this network of domestic work employers are brutal and their actions, ironic: while the women entering to work in their buildings are given no basic respect, they are expected to maintain the same for their employers. Upon not adhering, they will be replaced.

Since the demolition, Jai Bhim Nagar’s women’s lives, which have always carried the double burden of domestic labour, have become even harsher. The drudgery of their work at home was multiplied by the absence of electricity, water, and household assets they had spent years accumulating. This has meant that they spend longer hours working—the lives of most women at Jai Bhim Nagar and across the slums of Mumbai, has always been mired by the multiple types of labour that every waking hour is spent completing. For instance, irregular water supply and unsanitary toilets, giving rise to diseases, affect them more as taking care of the children and the aged is considered the woman’s responsibility. This is also reflected in how women are at the forefront of the struggle for rehabilitation, leading many delegations and protests demanding regular and clean water supply, sanitary living conditions and fumigation of mosquitoes from the municipality.

The demolition in Jai Bhim Nagar was on the basis of a complaint to the state Human Rights Commission that ‘unauthorised construction’ (referring to Jai Bhim Nagar) violates the human rights of the public at large staying in the said locality. Ironically, for most women living in Jai Bhim Nagar who are domestic workers in its high-rises, their very settlement was premised on improving the quality of life in the area. They were housed there, allowed to live, on the condition that they would not withhold their labour for domestic work, casual construction, electrical and other mechanical jobs, and so on. This is a paradox of neoliberal urbanisation. Cities are de-industrialised, throwing toiling people to the margins of the metropolis, and in their place emerge globally-networked centres of finance and services. The dreams of the land sharks, town planners, and those who come to inhabit these oases of opulence, is to create a ‘world class’ city to function as nodes of circulation of global finance and hi-tech activities of diverse nature, sanitised of all toiling humanity. This has only one roadblock: Essential labour such as domestic work, sanitation, construction, and various types of services requires that working people live near enough to their city without disturbing its lifeless beauty.

The need to exploit people’s capacity to work cannot be eliminated as long as profit remains the motor force of society. The basti, the barrio, the favela, the ghetto, the shanty town – the clinking wine glasses in infinity pools on top of the highest sky-rise face their horrific presence in the skyline. With a grin they seem to declare: Hamin ast -o- hamin ast -o- hamin ast!

This routinely takes on stark appearances when there is a minimum of resistance, such as in 2017 when a Bengali migrant domestic worker, Zohra, in Noida’s posh Mahagun Moderne gated community went to demand her wage dues and was forcefully withheld[1]. As the Uttar Pradesh police hesitated to file a complaint against the powerful employers, the Sethis, agitated residents from Zohra’s slum gathered outside the building complex for her release. This escalated to the private security firing on the crowd and the basti-dwellers being framed for ‘rioting’, theft and other criminal charges. The American estate-management company running the high-rises identified and blacklisted 80+ women domestic workers, a malicious media campaign painted the Bengali-speaking Muslims as ‘illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators’, and Zohra’s entire basti of 60 homes was promptly demolished by the police. Then BJP MP Mahesh Sharma assured the residents that 13 arrested slum-dwellers would not receive bail for years. The usefulness of insecure housing as a disciplining strategy for the urban precarity cannot be emphasised enough.

The precarity of “unauthorized living” unfolding through the demolition of Jai Bhim Nagar has only made visible the violence woven into the lives they live. As many of them have articulated, “Woh humme naukar samjhte hai, insaan nahi.” (We are primarily seen as servants, not as people). In singular systemic moments of crisis or collapse, such as slum demolitions, the reality of “unauthorised living” worsens an existing reality, whether that is of adult women facing precarity in their livelihoods as domestic workers, or young girls beginning to work as domestic workers, losing their right to education.

Capital thrives on cheap labour and segmentation. The working class, after being denied any claims to urban citizenry, ask whose city it is, whose space it is, and militantly asserts its inalienable right to dignity of labour, and all the resources that keep this labour thriving. The working class people of Jai Bhim Nagar are fighting for housing, health, education, and civic amenities such as water and electricity—the cost of their ‘social reproduction’. The movement is now proceeding with the demand for proper rehabilitation which is a political demand for a dignified and free life. Linked to this, is the possibility of taking this struggle against exploitation to the site of production, to the connected workplaces—asking for higher wages and better working conditions.

[1] See our earlier fact-finding report. COLLECTIVE. (2017). FF report on the incident in Noida on 11-12 July 2017. Published on 14 July 2017. Accessed on https://collective-india.com/fact-finding-noida-domestic-worker-case/.

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