India, June 12 -- What is the value of a dead "homemaker"? On Thursday, a Supreme Court bench put it at Rs.30,000 per month while adjudicating a case on calculation of compensation in a road accident case. The top court's judgment might be the first institutional acknowledgement of the value of unpaid and unrecognised labour that "homemakers"-overwhelmingly women in India-perform.

The numbers that should disabuse us of undermining the importance of such work have been around for a long time. According to the 2019 and 2024 Time Use Survey (TUS) data collected by the National Statistics Office (NSO), women spent close to eight times the time spent by men performing household and care work. This affects their ability to do paid work. The la...