By Geeta Menon and Vrashali Khandelwal
Karnataka’s recently proposed Domestic Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2025, is a landmark step towards regulating one of the largest and least protected sections of India’s workforce. Domestic work, long treated as too private, too informal, or too complex to govern, has remained out of the purview of most labour laws. As a result, wage disputes persist, employer-worker expectations are unclear, and social protection remains minimal.
The proposed Bill seeks to change this. The Bill mandates both employers and workers to register. It aims to officially recognise the employment relationship between an employer and a worker. Making both parties visible has the potential to bring transparency, ensure fair dispute resolution, extend protections, and create pathways for building social security. A written contract is an important first step — it gives the worker a verifiable work identity, ensures basic job security with minimum wages, and creates possibilities for provisioning of worker benefits such as medical care, old-age benefits, and many others. It also creates space for employers to contribute to social security in a structured way. Basically, a contract holds the power to turn invisible, private arrangements into visible, dignified employment relationships.
The challenge, however, lies in drafting contracts flexible enough to reflect the day-to-day realities of domestic work. A single domestic worker often juggles multiple employers, each with a different kind of arrangement. In some households, the work may be task-based, while in others, it may require a fixed number of hours. Often, workers move between these households, navigating different payment schedules, shifting expectations, and social dynamics. The complexity does not end there. Even within a single household, terms are constantly shifting. An employer may decide to pay a bonus, a worker may request a salary advance, or a family may require extra hours during the festive season. In such contexts, the boundaries between pre-determined tasks and responsive presence, or between contracted hours and actual hours worked, rarely hold firm. These negotiations are not exceptions to the rule; they are the very nature of the sector.
The proposed Bill represents a significant policy advance by mandating contracting, but its effectiveness will ultimately be judged by the quality of its implementation. There is universal agreement on the importance of extending protections to domestic workers, yet considerable uncertainty about how to operationalise these commitments in a sector defined by such intimate-personal arrangements. Recent experiments in Bengaluru point to what such an implementation could look like. The domestic workers’ rights union, Stree Jagruti Samiti, and a digital platform, Sampatti, have co-developed a system to generate employment and salary records — a possible pathway for scaling the Bill’s vision. Through simple WhatsApp-based chatbots, employers and workers validate their agreements and generate digital employment records. The platform also facilitates monthly salary payouts, providing a simple way to register the real nature of wage arrangements in this sector and convert them into verifiable salary records.
Initiatives such as these serve as important starting points, creating platforms that embrace complexity rather than flatten it through standardisation. Their success, however, rests on trust — particularly the credibility and insights that community organisations bring to the process of institutionalising such platforms.
While contracts and registration are essential starting points for worker identification, their operationalisation can only be successfully managed through partnerships with unions, community-based organisations and technology providers. The state’s role, then, is to ensure these processes are compliant and credible, while focusing its attention on the important task of designing and delivering worker benefits. This, in turn, compels the state to respond to critical questions for domestic workers, such as: How can medical coverage be structured to address occupation-related health issues, such as chronic back pain or respiratory problems? What level of maternity support would allow workers the time they need before returning to work? How can pensions be designed to accommodate irregular contributions while still guaranteeing income security in later years? And what role can worker facilitation centres play in ensuring these benefits reach workers effectively?
Answering these questions needs deeper insight into the everyday nature of domestic work. The Bill could open up precisely that space, enabling new forms of protection by making work arrangements visible. Importantly, the very platforms now being piloted could also serve as direct channels for inputs on the design and delivery of these benefits through the welfare fund proposed in the legislation.
Karnataka’s implementation of the proposed legislation has the potential to set a national precedent. It can demonstrate how public policy could potentially create space for local innovations, encouraging partnerships between community-based organisations and technology providers to build systems that strengthen — rather than replace — the relationships, while at the same time guaranteeing essential safeguards such as minimum wages and safe working conditions.
Geeta Menon is a women’s rights activist, and Vrashali Khandelwal is a researcher at IIHS, Bengaluru
