India, June 21 -- Sorry, your lordships. Women who labour at home to wash, clean, cook, bring up children, takeparents to the doctor, go to the market, and do the countless other tasks of physical and emotional labour that keep their families happy - are not "nation-builders". Call them homemakers. Call them unpaid domestic workers. Call them the scaffolding on which Busy Important men build their Busy Important careers. But, it's time to strip away the notion that the business of running a home is some sublime task suitable only for one gender. The Supreme Court was dealing with an old question of how to financially compensate for a life lost in an accident. Compensation for men can be computed on their income. But what is the value of a woman who makes no monetary contribution to a family but nonetheless provides it with free labour? Apart from the irony that the worth of a woman's life should arise only after her death, there is the old patriarchal trick of whitewashing work nobody really wants to do with a coat of saintliness. So, cooking is not only a woman's job, it acquires an added touch of nobility when only a woman does it - maa ke haath ka khaana (the food cooked by a mother's hand). When the Supreme Court observes that a "homemaker would now acquire the acronym of 'nation builder'," it's on us to reject the idea for what it is - one designed to keep us confined to the house, where we spend an average of 299 minutes a day to the 97 put in by men, according to the 2024 Time Use Survey. Nation-building notwithstanding, the observations are a continuation of case law that has since 2010 recognised the economic value of women's unpaid work. In previous cases, says Prabha Kotiswaran, professor of law and social justice at King's College, London, the court tended to award the bare minimum. Now, for the first time it has set a minimum of Rs.30,000 a month as the notional value of housework. Compensation for accidents will then begin at that valuation. This generosity, alas, does not extend to family courts where judges have been known to view a wife's failure to make tea and look after a husband's relatives as cruelty and, therefore, grounds for divorce. Judges are also known to lecture educated women for daring to seek maintenance and alimony instead of employment after a marriage collapses. But, for now, putting a notional salary on unpaid housework makes this labour visible and also valuable. A 2018 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) claimed that 16.4 billion hours are spent globally on unpaid care work every day. This, says Kotiswaran, in her upcoming book Wages for Housework, is the equivalent of two billion people working eight hours a day with no remuneration. Over 80% of this work is done by women and girls above the age of six, and signs of change are slow: Between 1997 and 2012, the gender gap in time spent on unpaid care declined by a mere seven minutes. At this rate, it will take another 210 years to bridge the gap. The challenge of getting more women into paid work is to even out the unpaid labour they perform at home. And to do that we need more than platitudes and pats on our backs. Women are not born with some inherent skill to do the laundry. But, yes, nation building via cooking and cleaning and bringing up upright citizens is everybody's job, women as well as men....