How much is a mother’s sleepless night worth? What is the market value of raising a child, caring for ageing parents, managing a household, providing emotional support, and holding a family together through invisible labour that rarely finds mention in balance sheets?
The Supreme Court has attempted to answer at least one part of that question. By recognising homemakers as “nation builders” and fixing ₹30,000 per month as the notional value of their domestic services for compensation under the Motor Vehicles Act, the Court has made an important legal and moral statement. It has acknowledged what generations of women have known all along—that unpaid domestic work has immense economic and social value.
Yet, while the recognition deserves appreciation, the number itself raises difficult questions.
For decades, the contribution of homemakers remained invisible because it carried no salary slip. Courts often struggled to determine compensation after the death of a homemaker because there was no measurable income to calculate the family’s loss. The Supreme Court’s judgment attempts to solve this legal problem by creating a standard benchmark. In that sense, the decision is progressive.
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But can the contribution of a woman within a family really be reduced to a monthly figure?
The nature of families has changed dramatically over the last few decades. In many urban and middle-class households today, women are not only homemakers but also working professionals. They earn salaries, contribute financially, and yet continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of cooking, cleaning, caregiving, managing children’s education, caring for elderly family members, and maintaining the emotional fabric of the household.
This is where the real question begins.
Imagine a woman earning ₹20,000 a month while her husband earns ₹1 lakh. Despite her job, she remains the primary caregiver at home because social expectations have changed far slower than economic realities. If domestic work is assigned a value of ₹30,000, would the conversation inside the household become healthier—or could the number unintentionally become another tool for comparison?
Could someone argue, “Your contribution is only worth ₹50,000 in total while I earn ₹1 lakh”?
That is precisely the danger of putting a fixed monetary value on work whose importance extends far beyond economics.
A homemaker’s role is not limited to household chores. She carries pregnancies, undergoes childbirth, often sacrifices her career, and bears the physical, emotional and mental burden of raising children. She becomes the family’s first teacher, counsellor, nurse, planner and emotional anchor. Much of this work cannot be outsourced, and even when it can, hired services rarely replicate the care, affection and continuity that define family relationships.
Can childbirth be assigned a monthly salary?
Can emotional labour be measured in rupees?
Can years of interrupted careers, missed opportunities and silent compromises be converted into compensation charts?
Perhaps not.
At the same time, ignoring economic value altogether has also proved unjust. For decades, unpaid care work remained legally invisible precisely because it had no recognised monetary worth. Women who spent their lives building families were often described as “non-earning dependants,” despite enabling the earning capacity of everyone else in the household. The Supreme Court rightly challenges that outdated notion.
The ₹30,000 figure, therefore, should perhaps be understood not as the price of a homemaker’s contribution but as a legal tool to ensure justice in compensation cases. It is a benchmark, not a valuation of human worth.
However, society must be careful not to mistake this legal benchmark for the actual value of a woman’s contribution.
The larger challenge remains unchanged. Recognition should translate into a more equal sharing of unpaid work within homes. If women continue to perform both paid employment and almost all domestic responsibilities, assigning a financial figure alone will not create equality. Real recognition lies in shared responsibility, not symbolic valuation.
The Supreme Court has rightly called homemakers “nation builders.” The phrase acknowledges that homes produce the human capital on which economies are built. But nation builders cannot be measured only through numbers.
The judgment begins an overdue conversation. It tells the law that unpaid work has value. Society must now ask the harder question: Is justice achieved by assigning a figure to invisible labour, or by ensuring that the burden of that labour is no longer invisible—or unequally shared—in the first place?
Perhaps ₹30,000 is not the answer. Perhaps it is only the beginning of a much larger debate about work, dignity, equality and the true meaning of contribution within a family.
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