From New America Media and FirstPost:

Commentary

KOLKATA, India--When I was a boy and first encountered a friend’s mother who worked outside the home, I told my own mother that I didn’t want her to ever go to work. I wanted her home when I came back from school.

My mother repeats this story fondly to this day while I cringe.

I see it as the story of the sexist little first-grader happy to reinforce gender roles " daddies go to work, mommies stay at home. My mother, secure about her role as homemaker, just sees it as cute. The government of India sees it as a problem.

A very well-intentioned Krishna Tirath, India’s Minister for Women and Child Development, wants to introduce a bill that would require women to be legally compensated by husbands for house work. Yes, we are talking about a monthly salary, paid out of their own salary by the husbands.

Women Left With Nothing

“A majority of women in India are involved in household chores after getting married but they do not get any salary for it,” Tirath told the Indian Express. “The socially accepted behavior becomes a tragedy when a woman gets divorced or widowed when she is left with nothing for survival. The government is mulling a law under which a husband will have to legally pay a definite amount to his wife from his salary." (No word if stay-at-home dads qualify for this or wives who do hold down a job but still do the housework.)

Tirath thinks this will empower women. I can see why. I remember meeting an elderly widow at an old age home, who found herself homeless after signing over her share of her property to her son.

Even her jewelry was gone, given away to daughters and daughters-in-law.

I remember her sitting in her white sari, on her bed in the dormitory room, an old black and white family picture on the nightstand by her bed. She could not believe that this was how she was being repaid for all the work she had put in raising her children and seeing them settled.

But how do you put a price tag on all that work? Once you go down that road where does a person end up? Does she get extra pay for cooking up an elaborate birthday dinner with banana blossom croquettes because that’s her husband’s favorite dish, as opposed to dishing up the usual dal-chawal? Is it going to be prorated according to the number of children she has?

Will men be able to claim a rebate or deduction for anything they do, such as going to the market on Sunday with a shopping list? Do the household expenses have to come out of that salary or is this her personal nest egg? Does a woman’s housekeeping salary end with her husband’s death if her housekeeping does not? Should the son be contributing part of his salary to her--and his wife? (That could be endless new fuel for those saas-bahu TV dramas). And what about all the time she spends not actually cooking or cleaning, but supervising the cook, fluffing the sick child’s pillow or just being there?

Ultimately that is the greatest value a homemaker brings to the family. She is there for her children’s bruised knees, her maid’s dramas and the courier guy’s deliveries of hubby’s credit card bill. How do you put a rupee figure to that?

What’s a Homemaker Worth?

In fact, how do you put a rupee figure on the worth of the homemaker at all without, in effect, cheapening it? The government wants to figure out what all the services a housewife provides would cost on the open market. Therefore some bureaucrat will have to find the formula for how many bais equal one memsahib.

And once you figure that out, a man will have to hand over that amount as a “salary" to his wife every month. These days more and more couples have separate bank accounts and many men do just that--fork over a fixed amount every month for household expenses.

My father’s paycheck just went into their joint account. That was regarded as the unwritten rule of marriage. That money was for the family. When he made investments he spread them out between my mother, my sister and me.

Over a decade after his death, my mother, a homemaker, uses her own money to figure out what vegetables to buy. When she haggles with the fishmonger, it is her own money she is stretching--and she pays her own medical bills. She also complains about how much her expensive eye drops will cost every month but stoutly refuses any money from her children for them.

Tirath will say she is lucky. Many women are not. But the fact is my mother had an equal share in everything my father earned. If Tirath’s bill had been in effect, in the name of empowering my mother, it might have just entitled her to only 25 percent of my father’s income.

None of this takes into account what’s called the opportunity cost of the career not chosen. My mother was well-known as a dancer and taught at a reputed school before her marriage. She gave it up after marriage of her own accord. But had she continued she might have had her own successful school. Who can measure the cost of the road not taken?

Economically Wrong

In her take on the bill for “India Real Time,” Rupa Subramanya writes that while measuring the value of unpaid work at home is “conceptually correct and well worth trying," the salary-sharing proposal is “definitely wrong." It’s not only “paternalistic and illiberal," she writes, it’s also economically wrong.

(M)aking men pay their wives for household work doesn’t increase the household’s total income and amounts instead to a forced transfer payment from husband to wife--like a tax within the household imposed by the government.

If the bill does go through, though, I can see two possible advantages.

Men might finally understand that watching television does not count as a household chore. This might get them off their butts and doing some tasks around the house just to hold on to a little more of their paychecks. Also, maids and cooks all over India might suddenly rejoice, as they get a pay increase when housewives try to pump up the “market value" of house work.

Other than that, I am afraid the government is blundering in where angels fear to tread.

Bean counters have no place on our kitchen counters. The government wants to figure out the cost of housework now so women don't have to pay the price for doing it later in life.

But we already have alimony laws and laws that require children to support their parents in old age. How about actually enforcing those laws instead of creating more household legislation that will be next to impossible to enforce?

Photo: A woman lights candles during Diwali, India’s Festival of Lights, in Kolkata, as her son lights sparklers. (AFP)

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