This report is part of a series that seeks to use COVID-19 and its attendant lockdowns in India as a crucial moment to assess social protection. It is the part 2 of the series that lays out the extent of the role of the non-state actors in providing relief during each of the COVID19 lockdowns. It has stories, excerpts , narratives and datasets from around the country regarding the forms, platforms/ mediums of relief as well as stoppages, deviances and obstructions while carrying out the same

This study report is an important contribution towards understanding employers’ perceptions, rationale and bases that underlie how employers in urban India engage, value, and perceive domestic work. To do so, it draws upon data from personal interviews with 403 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities– Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, neighborhood type and across households with and without women working for wages. This report is the third of a three-part series, with the first report looking at paid and unpaid hours taken to reproduce a household in urban India, and the second report looking at the quality of employment for paid domestic workers.

This study report contributes towards understanding employers’ perspectives on existing working conditions and practices relating to recruitment, income security, employment security and social security available to domestic workers. To do so, this report draws upon data from 3,067 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities– Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, religion, neighborhood type and across households with and without women working for wages. This report is the second of a three-part series, with the first report looking at the total number of paid and unpaid hours it takes to reproduce a household in urban India, and the third assessing employer motivations, beliefs and perspectives about domestic work and workers.

The key question of this study is to ask: what does it take to reproduce a household in urban India? Using a series of time-use surveys, we measure the time taken for 33 different tasks within activity clusters such as domestic services (cleaning, food preparation, procurement, upkeep) and caregiving services (child care and elderly care). Within this, we assess both unpaid work done by members of the household and paid work done by an externally engaged domestic worker. We do so across 9,636 households in two large metropolitan Indian cities– Bengaluru and Chennai – with variations across socio-economic status, caste, religion, neighbourhood type and across households with and without women working for wages.

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