INDIA’S FEDERAL government is considering a proposal for husbands to pay their wives a monthly salary for home-keeping.
“Every housewife has a full-time job of keeping the house, cooking, caring for children, managing household expenditure and accounts. She deserves a monthly salary and husbands must pay that,” woman and child development minister Krishna Tirath said recently.
She said her ministry was evaluating the annual financial worth of an average housewife’s efforts and would break it down into her monthly worth. It would even consider enacting a law to ensure this entitlement.
This unique proposal, received with curiosity and amusement in a male-dominated country, was prompted by a recent online survey in Britain that evaluated the average housewife’s job to be worth about £30,000 a year.
The website also found the typical UK housewife spent nearly nine hours a day on household chores, including more than four hours looking after children.
Ministry sources said an Indian housewife’s daily investment in children was easily double that, as her existence was not as mechanised; she performed arduous chores such as house cleaning and washing clothes the traditional way – by hand.
Ms Tirath said the move was being contemplated as a measure of economic empowerment for women. “Today housewives are listed in the census as unemployed. We want to change that mindset. A woman has a full-time job of managing her house and looking after her children, but it is a thankless job. In fact, I am against the term housewives. We should be called house engineers,” she said.
Many, however, greeted the proposal with scepticism in a country where women continue to be subservient, deprived of education, economic freedom and basic rights. The number of Indian brides burnt to death for not bringing an adequate dowry, for instance, is on the rise and attempts to reserve one-third of all legislative seats for women are still languishing.
In 2010, 8,391 dowry death cases were reported across India, rendering an outrageous average of a bride being burnt every 90 minutes. A decade earlier this number had been 6,995, but it climbed steadily to 8,093 in 2007 and to 8,391 three years later, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau figures.
Although India was one of the first countries in the world to have a female prime minister – Indira Gandhi – and subsequently a woman president, Pratibha Patil, who retired last month, its supposedly more conservative neighbour Pakistan has twice as many women MPs.
