By Emaan Chimote and Manisha Dhulipala

In Hyderabad, the quiet rhythm of economically privileged life is maintained by an equally quiet workforce—women who clean, cook, and care for the homes of others while remaining absent from most records of formal labour. Domestic work is essential to the functioning of the city, yet workers remain relegated to the informal sector, unrecognised, underpaid, and unprotected. They sustain households, but their own lives are marked by invisibility.

This invisibility is neither incidental nor new. The interlocking hierarchies of caste, gender, and religion have long structured domestic work in India. In Telangana, as elsewhere, it is overwhelmingly women from minority and marginalised Muslim communities who fill the ranks of domestic workers. The Telangana caste survey, published in 2024, revealed that over 56% of the state’s population belongs to Backward Classes, 17.3% to Scheduled Castes, and 10.4% to Scheduled Tribes.

Informal economy

In Hyderabad, this stratification is lived in the economies of care and maintenance. Anushyama Mukherjee, an assistant professor at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, works extensively on documenting the movement of women migrants from Barkas (Hyderabad) into cities due to economic necessity. Agricultural stagnation, debt, displacement, and shrinking local economies push women into the city, where domestic work is often the only option available. Yet the city offers little in return. There are no formal contracts, no stable wages, no health benefits, or social security.

A 2023 survey by the Montfort Social Institute in Hyderabad captures the scale of this precarity in numbers: 81% of domestic workers earned below the state’s minimum wage, 96% had no weekly day of rest, and 68% had never received a raise. Workdays routinely extend to twelve hours or more, particularly for live-in workers. There are no standardised protections governing their conditions. Instead, entitlements depend on the benevolence of employers.

What governs these relationships is not law, but a cultural script. The phrase “like family” surfaces often in conversations with employers, a familiar refrain used to justify informal arrangements, irregular payments, and the denial of rights. But proximity does not protect against mistreatment, wage theft, or verbal and physical abuse. Domestic workers, though physically embedded within the most intimate spaces of households, remain socially and economically distant.

Policy promises and structural gaps

On paper, there is some architecture for protection. Domestic workers are nominally included under the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act of 2008, which was designed to extend social security to informal workers. Yet, as researcher and assistant professor M. Paliwal and colleagues have argued, implementation has been haphazard and inconsistent. Telangana is no exception. In 2025, after sustained advocacy from the Telangana Domestic Workers Union, a draft bill proposing minimum wages and social security for domestic workers was submitted to the state Labour Department.

In January 2024, the Telangana government issued a notification revising the minimum wages for domestic workers under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. The Telangana Gazette detailed a structured pay scale: Rs. 599 for half an hour of work, scaling up to Rs. 9559 for an eight-hour work-day, tied to the Consumer Price Index. The WageIndicator Foundation estimated that a worker spending 1.5 hours daily would earn Rs. 1914 per month. Even working 10.5 hours a day, earning Rs. 13,400, would fall short of Hyderabad’s estimated cost of living, Rs. 40,000. However, enforcement is limited, as inspectors may only enter homes with authorisation from the Joint Commissioner of Labour, rendering wage protections largely symbolic.

Struggles for recognition

In the absence of state accountability, the National Domestic Workers Movement (NDWM), active since 1985, and the Telangana Domestic Workers Union have pushed for formalisation, fair wages, and social security. Yet organising remains difficult—domestic work is isolated, scattered across private homes, and workers fear employer retaliation.

This precarity is compounded by caste and religious hierarchies. The work itself is gendered—seen as an extension of women’s “natural” duties—and further stratified by caste. This precarity is deepened by caste and religious hierarchies. Tasks like toilet cleaning are informally allocated to Dalit women, and Muslim women often perform cooking work.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of this workforce. NDWM reports that in 2020, they reached over 41,000 workers with supplies and training opportunities, but civil society support cannot substitute for state intervention. Many domestic workers were dismissed without pay, barred from apartment complexes, or asked to live in without adequate compensation.

A rights-based framework

What Telangana has at present is a fragmented, reactive policy landscape. The 2025 draft bill is a necessary beginning, but the state’s approach remains piecemeal. Kerala’s welfare board model for domestic workers offers a promising precedent—it enables worker registration, welfare fund collection, and benefit disbursal. But paperwork alone does not translate to rights. Without political will, administrative infrastructure, and continuous worker participation, even the most well-crafted policy will remain inert.

What Telangana needs is not just a policy but a rights-based framework. This must begin with written contracts that clearly stipulate wages, working hours, leave entitlements, and grievance redressal mechanisms. Social security must include health insurance, pensions, maternity benefits, and access to legal aid for dispute resolution. State-led educational campaigns for both employers and workers are essential to dismantle the cultural norms that normalise exploitation.

As Hyderabad continues to urbanise, the demand for domestic labour will only increase. Telangana stands at an inflection point: it can either persist with a model of growth built on invisible, underpaid, and unprotected labour, or it can lead in formalising this essential workforce. Recognising domestic workers as formal workers is not merely a matter of economic policy—it is a question of dignity, justice, and the kind of society we want to build.

For now, the lives of domestic workers in Telangana remain caught between the private spaces they sustain and the public policies that continue to neglect them. They remain, in every sense, hidden in plain sight—crucial yet dispensable, visible yet unseen.

Emaan Chimote studies Biology and Entrepreneurship at Ashoka University, with a focus on how science and policy shape ethics, gender, and inequality. She is currently researching the male-default bias in Indian health research.

Manisha Dhulipala is a Senior Research Fellow at CDPP. She holds a double masters in Environmental Sciences and Sustainable Development. Her areas of research interest are public health, environment & sustainable development, education, and gender.

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