Wages for Housework: India's Experiment with Unconditional Cash Transfers to Women

About the Book

A silent revolution is underway in India today. Starting in 2020, twelve states have rolled out unconditional cash transfers to nearly 118 million women. While the media disparages these transfers as 'freebies', Wages for Housework: India's Experiment with Unconditional Cash Transfers to Women offers the first book-length study of these transfers, using social reproduction feminism, particularly the wages for housework campaign, to theorize unconditional cash transfers as providing economic recognition of women's unpaid domestic and care work. Against the backdrop of a low female labour force participation rate, a residual welfare regime, and an entrenched culture of gendered familialism wherein women are presumed responsible for care, the book addresses arguments for and against unconditional cash transfers in feminist economics and welfare theory. In doing so, it recollects the vision of the founding mothers of the Indian Constitution who advocated for the recognition of women's unpaid work. It traces how Indian courts have, since Independence, treated women's unpaid domestic and care work as being on par with an occupation to hold that the economic recognition of unpaid work is a step towards the constitutional vision of equality and dignity. Through an in-depth study of unconditional cash transfers in three states, namely, Goa, Assam, and West Bengal (implemented in 2013, 2020, and 2021, respectively), Kotiswaran elaborates on state-specific welfare regimes and analyses the implementation of cash transfers through interviews with bureaucrats, academics, feminist activists, and women beneficiaries to understand if and how they have resulted in women's empowerment, whether in terms of education, paid employment, or the gendered division of labour. In conclusion, the work posits that unconditional cash transfers represent an unprecedented and welcome expansion of the Indian welfare regime and to be truly gender transformative, they need to be embedded in a broader feminist agenda for care.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.