Background

Whether as domestic workers or street vendors, women constitute a disproportionate portion of India’s informal sector. According to a 2018 report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), around 52.7% of India’s 287 million total workers in the unorganized sector are women. Working in the informal sector is often a vulnerable undertaking, and gender only exacerbates this vulnerability. 

Not only do these women not have the protection of labor laws and social benefits, such as insurance or paid leaves, but they also work in dangerous conditions for extremely low wages. Such a sense of unsafety is worsened as women working within the informal economy are often subjected to different forms of sexual violence. The legal system too has failed to make a meaningful intervention in this direction. For example, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, enacted in 2013, and commonly called POSH, is ineffective for women within the informal sector. This is because most women workers are unaware of the different legal provisions that they can use to their advantage.

In the absence of any safety net in the form of legal protections, proper awareness, or conducive social support, women within the informal sector are marked by a pervasive precarity that threatens their socioeconomic safety as well as personal well-being. Thus, even as women workers are instrumental in the vital processes such as urbanization that are responsible for the developmental growth of our society, they are abjectly excluded from the purview of benefitting from this development. It is precisely to address this chronic uncertainty that plunges the lives of these women into a series of unknown perilous situations that Project Data for Good seeks to create a safe and inclusive environment for women domestic workers in India.