Suman K. Sharma
Women and Child Development (WCD) department in Government of India is considering a proposal to make husbands pay their ‘non working’ (read not employed elsewhere) wives for keeping their homes. “It will give a more socially empowered identity to these women,” WCD minister, Krishna Tirath recently told a news agency.
Sounds good. But government needs to tread softly. It is intruding into the privacy of homes, trying to be a mediator between man and wife. Nobody is contesting that homemakers do work that makes men’s life worth living to its fullest potential. The point is how we should go about it. The easiest option would be to force husbands (force how?) to pay wages to their non-working wives. A joint secretary signs a notification and home-makers across the country turn into wage earners overnight. But as we shall see presently, it would open a Pandora’s Box. TOR (Terms of Reference) may have to be drawn up, Charter of Duties cast, and most important of all, each and every task assigned to the housewife evaluated. Government may well have to appoint a full-fledged wage commission for home-makers.
Monetising the value of services rendered by a housewife would be like putting a price on the sacred bond that conjoins a wife with her husband. Leave aside the mundane jobs like cooking, cleaning up and nurturing children. Is there any yardstick fair enough to recompense adequately a wife’s welcoming smile to her husband when he returns home after a day’s hard work? Or afford him the warmth of a reliable companion when the sunny side of life suddenly turns cold and gloomy? And how will be the discomfiture of pregnancy, the near fatal pangs of a delivery and the life-long care of a mother evaluated in terms of so many rupees a month?
Asking a man to pay his wife a wage would be demeaning to women. It would make the man the master and the wife his servant. There is a 60-year old rule in Government of India: honorary appointees are to be paid a token salary of rupee one. No, this is not some kind of a nazrana which our forebears paid to the rulers in token of submission, or an offering the devotees make to their deities. The purpose is simple and straightforward: the all-powerful GoI by paying monthly salary wants to establish a servant-and-master relationship with the honorary appointees, regardless of how invaluable their services to the society at large might be.
Then how about empowerment of women as the worthy WCD minister has envisaged? Yes, there is a way out. Housewives must be paid, and paid adequately. But in doing so, we should follow the ethos of the society. Be it Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, marriage is a contract. A contract is not good unless it covers, to their mutual satisfaction, the financial interests of the parties involved. In a Hindu marriage, for instance, one significant step of the seven-step saptapadi specifically enjoins upon the husband to engage his spouse in all his financial dealings.
What is required therefore is to work out a viable formula to give the home-maker her due and at the same time enable the man to provide for contingencies as well as a secure future of his family. There are no free lunches anywhere. Running a household requires funds, and so do the personal needs of man and wife. Particularly in a family where man is the sole wage-earner, a fine balance has to be maintained between the income, expenses and the need for domestic savings. It would be an uphill task for the Government to determine what proportion of the man’s earnings should go to meet each one of these imperatives.
If such a template is indeed evolved, then the next step would be to entrust the share of domestic expenses and homemaker’s personal needs to the care of the woman herself. Say, if it is laid down that for every hundred rupees he earns, a man shall keep to himself forty for his personal needs and future savings; then sixty rupees must go to his wife to spend as she deems fit.
There will be men who would fight such a proposition tooth and nail. Their arch argument: housewives are innocent of the intricacies of handling money, the vagaries of bazaar and the wily world waiting outside to rob them of all they have. Nothing can be more ridiculous. Women in general tend to be more conservative, circumspect and down to earth fund-managers than men folk. It is not to deny that some housewives may not be very careful with their spending; but for that matter so are men. There are instances galore when a housewife sprang a pleasant surprise at her financially oppressed husband doling out a chunk of money out of her personal savings. There has to be a shift in paradigm, therefore, in favour of housewives. Homemakers need to be provided fund and given a free hand to make homes out of houses.
Our ancestors called housewives grehini, the term that is used even today in its colloquial form of gharwali – mistress of the house. Government in its zeal to empower home-makers must ensure that no ill conceived measures on its part degrade a co-owner to the status of a salaried maid.
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