Citation :

Jaitra Talreja, "Rights on Paper, Risks at Home: Legal Visibility and Everyday Precarity of Women Domestic Workers in Mumbai," International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 1-8, 2026. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/23942703/IJHSS-V13I5P101

Abstract

Domestic work in Mumbai is one of the most legally unprotected forms of labour today, with around 50 million workers excluded from basic legal rights. Even though women’s domestic work facilitates India’s middle-class economy and sustains millions of households in the country, the poor workers are still left with welfare provisions that exist solely on paper, as they have no meaningful enforcement. This research focuses on Mumbai specifically and the difference between the formal legal rights available to women domestic workers and their actual lived experience of those rights in the workplace. While existing literature does include the workplace conditions of women and policy frameworks nationally, there is no notable socio-legal research that provides the lived experiences of workers in Mumbai. That is what this research aims to address. This study is built on six semi-structured interviews with women domestic workers, which are then analysed using thematic analysis to form patterns. These patterns reveal that the awareness of welfare schemes does not always lead to access to those schemes for individual domestic workers, and how the constrained conditions of the interview itself turned out to become the most prominent evidence of the invisibility of women domestic workers in the workplace, which was the main goal this research set out to explore. All the findings concluded in this research contribute to the developing field of socio-legal studies that argue for the legal protection of domestic workers by making it easier for domestic workers to be aware of their legal protections, and, as concluded from this research, make it easier for workers to access them.

Keywords

Awareness And Access, Labour Laws, Mumbai, Welfare Rights, Women Domestic Workers.

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