Policy Update
Apurva Jha
Background
India’s demographic advantage is founded on the fact that it has one of the youngest and largest working-age populations in the world. However, a major portion of this population, especially women, do not participate in the workforce. Instead, they engage in unpaid domestic and caregiving work within the home. As per the Periodic Labor Force Survey 2023–24, 36.7% of the female workforce and 19.4% of the total workforce perform unpaid activities in the household sector. Earlier Time Use Survey data (2019) revealed that 81% of the female population, aged 6 years and above, spends more than five hours every day doing unpaid work at home.
This number shot up to 92% for females aged between 15 and 59 years of age, while only 24.5% of men claimed to spend more than one hour a day in household activities. The Time Use Survey 2024 presents the situation even clearer: women spend an average of 289 minutes performing work in the unpaid domestic service sector and 137 minutes on the unpaid caregiving sector, compared to much lower times of 88 and 75 minutes, respectively, for men. Additionally, 92.9% of women aged between 15 and 59 engage in unpaid domestic work as opposed to only 30.4% of men.
The care economy is the larger system containing this type of workforce. It includes not only direct care, which means compensation jobs such as caring for children, elderly care, and providing help for sick or disabled, but also indirect care, which can be defined as cooking, cleaning, and managing households.These services are delivered through both formal institutions (such as child are centre and elder-care facilities) and informal household arrangements , the latter accounting for larger share.and various informal means at homes, the latter being significantly more efficient.
As per Times Use Survey 7.5% to 36% of India’s GDP comes from this type of work, even though due to its nature, it is not affected by market transactions, which means it cannot be included in GDP measuring process..
Table 1: Percentage of persons aged 6 years and above participating in different activities in a day, by sector and gender (all-India, 2024)
Source: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Time Use Survey (TUS), January–December 2024, Press Information Bureau, Government of India.
Although it represents such a crucial part of the entire economy, care work done in homes has been treated as essentially non-existent by policy, laws, and markets for decades now as a private rather than public activity.
In spite of being one of the largest sectors within the economy, domesticated care work has never been given a separate identity according to Indian law until now. On June 11, 2026, a bench of the Supreme Court of India, presided over by Justices Sanjay Karol and N. Kotiswar Singh, directly addressed this issue in Shishu Pal @ Shish Ram & Ors. v. Surjeet & Ors. (2026 INSC 634) stating how the loss of domestic care provided by homemakers can qualify as an independent head of compensation with a baseline notional monthly income of Rs. 30,000 which will be increased by 10% every three years.
The court also stated how the term homemaker should be replaced with Nation Builder because of the contributions made by them. The implications of this decision were drawn from the data provided by the Time Use Survey, establishing the links between its narrow interpretation of accident compensation and the fight for giving legal recognition to care work as a form of economic activity. The following sections will analyze if this logic holds when examined against the context of a concrete policy that directly deals with homemakers, namely, the Gruha Lakshmi Yojana of Karnataka.
Functioning
The Gruha Lakshmi Yojana of Karnataka is the best example of that acknowledgement in practice. It was launched as an initiative for general welfare measures in 2023 and is designed around homemakers. Thus, it is a good case to assess whether policy has caught up with the Supreme Court’s declaration regarding the significance of their work.
Shishu Pal, on the other hand, functions very specifically as a rule of compensation law, since it establishes new methods of determining damages for a household maker who is dead or has suffered from disability. In fact, it assesses the value of their domestic care services at a minimum of Rs 30,000. However, it does not create any rights for a household maker who is alive. In fact, the extent to which the Court’s reasoning can go beyond accident law is defined by the way the executive arrangements that reach professionals who work as household makers in real life work, and this makes Gruha Lakshmi a good test case
How the policy operates:Under the Gruha Lakshmi scheme, a woman regarded as the head of the family is entitled to receive an amount of Rs 2,000 monthly (total Rs 24,000 per annum). The eligibility for this scheme is determined by the ration card of the family, and all procedures are based on it. The applicant must be a bona fide resident of Karnataka and must be recorded as the head of the family on the ration card or an Antyodaya, APL, or BPL card. In this context, the term ‘woman’ does not only mean a married woman but also includes unmarried, divorced, or widowed women.
Institutional framework: This program is managed by the Karnataka Department of Women and Child Development (DWCD). It accepts applications through Seva Sindhu online portal, Karnataka One and Bangalore One centers, and gram panchayats. This scheme is similar to other four schemes— Gruha Jyothi (free electricity scheme), Anna Bhagya (subsidized rice scheme), Yuva Nidhi (employment allowance scheme), Shakti (free bus travel scheme)— launched by the government of Karnataka in 2023.
Implementation mechanism: Registration began on July 14, 2023, with identity verification by Aadhaar card, ration card, and bank passbook officials at the block level. The first Direct Benefit Transfer of Rs 2,000 was transferred into beneficiaries’ Aadhaar-linked bank accounts starting from August 30, 2023, and thereafter every month via Direct Benefit Transfer. In 2025, the state introduced biometric verification through its “Kutumba” app and approximately 17,000 kiosks to verify beneficiaries and eliminate duplicate and ineligible entries.
Funding structure: Gruha Lakshmi is entirely state-funded through the Karnataka budget, with no Central government cost-sharing. Disbursement totalled Rs 17,000 crore in 2023–24, and the 2024–25 budget allocation rose to Rs 28,608 crore making it, by allocation, the single largest of Karnataka’s five guarantee schemes and a substantial recurring claim on the state’s annual budget.
Progress and implementation status: Coverage grew from roughly 1.1 crore women at the August 2023 rollout to about 1.17 crore by January 2024, and to over 1.28–1.31 crore registered beneficiaries by 2025, with monthly transfers described by the department as “regularly received” outside two isolated disruptions discussed under Performance below.
Performance
Before Gruha Lakshmi’s official commencement, it was already impressive in scale. It was reported by The Hindu that 1.33 crore women had registered for the initiative by August 2023. The then Chief Minister Siddaramaiah noted it was poised to become “one of the largest government initiatives in the country”, with Karnataka pledging around Rs 32,000 crore every year after its full implementation. This level of scale has mostly persisted for the two years.
The evidence considered during this period can be derived from Karnataka’s budget documents, records regarding Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT) payments, and the state government’s response to a question that was raised in the State Assembly. This is the most similar version of the Union budget, PR releases, and reports by parliamentary committees on which this document is based. These documents reveal a clear increase in payments.
The amount of payments increased from Rs 17,000 Crore in 2023-24 to Rs 50,005 Crore paid to 1.28 Crore benefactors by August 2025, which included 23 lakh women belonging to Scheduled Castes and 8 lakh belonging to Scheduled Tribes, plus an annual allocation of Rs 28,608 crore. This amount makes Gruha Lakshmi outstrip all other Karnataka-assured programs by monetary amounts, and one of the biggest cash transfer programs for women in India, and comparable to the cash transfer programs in Madhya Pradesh (the Ladli Behna Yojana) and Odisha (the Subhadra Yojana).
Trend analysis throughout this timeframe also reveals two key operational difficulties that need to be mentioned in order to create the whole picture of the performance. Firstly, in the summer of 2024, the delayed allocation of funds from the government resulted in approximately three hundred thousand women not receiving their payments for June and July for almost a couple of months, with the officials were unable to specify when payments would resume about when the funds will be released again.
This shows that even the biggest and most famous transfer program may fail due to different fiscal execution stages. Secondly, in 2025 in the result of the relevant re-verification of applicants for the scheme more than two hundred and thirteen thousand beneficiaries were disqualified from the list of receivers of the benefits due to the fact that the women or their husbands were found to be paying taxes.
It is important to mention that, in contrast to centrally-sponsored schemes, this new program of Gruha Lakshmi was never audited by the CAG or assessed by the independent Economic Survey, meaning that almost all existing information is based solely on the government’s reports and responses to the legislature.
Impact
In terms of its main aim aiding housewives and women recognized as heads of households — data from the officials on the funds disbursed as well as the reports provided by government of Karnataka suggest that the scheme has consistently achieved reach as well as access on a large scale and its success over several years as well as a re-verification process provides evidence of lasting administrative effectiveness. Other independent studies seem to be confirming this assertion too — the November 2025 research led by Prabha Kotiswaran from King’s College London revealed that 99 percent of Gruha Lakshmi beneficiaries were able to control their funds, most of which had been spent on food and living expenses.
By comparing the arguments in Shishu Pal and the updated policy making developments analyzed in the Background, one finds a more specific constraint due to the fact that being eligible has nothing to do with how much or how intensively care is being provided, the program serves as a simple cash transfer to the women regarded as heads of household, rather than being a form of acknowledgment for care provision the separation the Supreme Court stressed out.
Moreover, there is no connection between the Gruha Lakshmi scheme and investing in the care infrastructure (childcare, elderly care) that can help to eliminate the above-mentioned time burden; it is just about the money instead of those 289 minutes of unpaid housework and 137 minutes of providing unpaid care services the 2024 Time Use Survey establishes.
Emerging Issues
Policy design: Household eligibility is determined based on ration-card ownership and tax status of the householder, rather than actual evidence of caregiving. As a result, deserving beneficiaries may be excluded and women who do not actually carry out care-work may be included.
Financing: The total amount of over Rs 50,000 crores spent in the last two years, entirely funded by the state and without any help from the Centre, brings forth the issue of sustainability of such an expenditure in the long run and whether less economically sound states could do it at all on similar large scale.
Implementation: Disbursement continuity is determined more by the regular monthly allocation of the budget than by the simple and accountable approval of the total spending. This can result in serious challenges for those who depend on such payment.
Monitoring and accountability: The removal of over two lakh beneficiaries in 2025 indicates that verification gaps existed for a considerable time prior to their detection; lack of any CAG audit or independent assessment until now implies that the scheme’s own disbursement figures are the only source of evidence for its performance.
Inclusion:Both women with improperly up-to-date ration-card information, as well as claims to headship in households, run the risk of being excluded, irrespective of the actual care work performed by them – this is opposite to the former type of failure seen in the case of the ineligible-inclusion dilemma.
Institutional coordination: While Gruha Lakshmi operates under the aegis of Karnataka’s DWCD, its relation to the judicial evaluation of care labor through Shishu Pal is absent, as is the correlation with the national initiatives on the subject (Maternity Benefit Act, Anganwadi Services); both the scheme in question and the ruling provide similar lines of reasoning on acknowledging the importance of homemakers, but only the Court links this recognition with the act of labor itself, and none of the existing frameworks connects these two.
Legal recognition: Although care work constitutes a great part of the economy, it has never gained any recognized status in Indian law a homemaker’s work has been of little importance to the state in its assessment of her life or her loss. This has been evident in the area of compensation law, where courts have treated homemakers as dependants of the earning members of the family, thus putting a very low value on the loss of a homemaker compared to the loss suffered by a wage earner, or leaving it unvalued altogether.
Shishu Pal addressed this issue but only in compensation law, though, as the remainder of this paragraph illustrates, the absence of a homemaker’s recognition continues in the context of welfare programs such as Gruha Lakshmi.
Way Forward
Together, Shishu Pal and Gruha Lakshmi come from two different directions to arrive at the same unfinished task of assessing the contributions of India’s care economy which accounts for 7.5 to 36% of its GDP, plays a key role in attaining the demographic dividend referred to at the beginning of this text, and helps support India’s national commitment to increasing female labour force participation.
To achieve this, a total of four steps must be taken in order to solve the design, funding, implementation and coordination problems that have just been discussed. The first step is to change the eligibility criteria in home-based schemes from indirect measures such as income or headship to a direct measure of the burden from care work for mothers based on the rationale provided by the Supreme Court.
A second step is to apply income support-based schemes that should work alongside investment schemes targeted at care services such as childcare and eldercare to ensure that income equivalence does not simply lead to cash being transferred in lieu of the time devoted to care.
The third step is to ensure uninterrupted disbursal of funds by introducing ring-fenced funding. Lastly, the connection between judical and executive power should work in tandem , so that homemakers are not just recognised in court rooms but support through policy on the grounds.Third, maintaining disbursement continuity must be safeguarded against the delays caused by the usual release of funds in the budget since the beneficiaries rely heavily on it for their monthly continuity.
Fourth, it is crucial to streamline the judicial and executive paths — possibly through a coordination mechanism in the Ministry of Women and Child Development — so that policies intended for housewives in the states do not use phrases from court language without understanding the principles behind it and independent monitoring (CAG audit, academic evaluation) is made effective in determining impact using the principles applicable to centrally-sponsored schemes.
Selected References and Important Links
State homemaker cash transfer scheme- State homemaker cash transfer scheme
Ministry of Women and Child Development-Ministry of women and child development
Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (Time Use Survey) —Ministry of statistics programme and implementation (time use survey)
Economic Advisory Council to the PM (EAC-PM) — Economic Advisory Council to the PM (EAC-PM) —
Karnataka Department of Women and Child Development —Karnataka Department of Women and Child Development —
Supreme Court of India — Supreme Court of India —
Seva Sindhu Guarantee Schemes Portal —Seva Sindhu Guarantee Schemes Portal —
Karnataka Finance Department (Budget documents) Karnataka Finance Department (Budget documents)
The Hindu coverage of Gruha Lakshmi enrollment —The Hindu coverage of Gruha Lakshmi enrollment —
Deccan Herald coverage of the scheme’s implementation — Deccan Herald coverage of the scheme’s implementation —
About the Contributor
I am Apurva Jha currently working as a Reserach intern at IMPRI
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. Arjun Kumar for his guidance and approval of this topic, and for his continued mentorship throughout the research process. Sincere thanks to the two reviewers, Dolly Kaushik and Simona for their valuable insights and feedback, which substantially strengthened the analysis and argument presented in this paper. The author, Apurva Jha is also grateful to the IMPRI Insights team for the opportunity to contribute to this policy update series.
Reviewers
Dolly Kaushik and Simona
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed in this policy update are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of IMPRI or any affiliated institution. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information and data presented, readers are encouraged to verify facts independently before relying on them for any decision-making purpose.
