SC ruling: Empowering women | Photo Credit: Bohdan Skrypnyk

On June 11, the Supreme Court fixed a minimum notional income of ₹30,000 per month for homemakers, created a distinct head of compensation called “loss of domestic care” in motor accident claims, and mandated a 10 per cent increase in this floor every three years.

In doing so, it recognised unpaid domestic work as a measurable economic contribution and ended the discretion that tribunals had exercised, inconsistently and often inadequately, for decades.

The bench’s observation carries more weight than the number itself. It is ironic, Justices Sanjay Karol and NK Singh noted, to describe a homemaker as dependent on earning members when the household’s functioning depends substantially on the homemaker. Motor Vehicles Act tribunals had long valued such a life by instinct rather than principle. The June 11 judgment ends that. The homemaker is now a nation builder, in the court’s own word, with a court-validated minimum contribution that claimants and their lawyers can hold to.

The economic data the bench cited deserves wider attention. Drawing on India’s Time Use Survey and international studies, the court noted that women spend over seven hours a day on unpaid domestic tasks, perform nearly 2.6 times more unpaid caregiving work than men, and contribute an estimated 15-17 per cent of India’s GDP through this labour. That figure appears nowhere in the national accounts. Conventional GDP measurement excludes household production entirely. The Supreme Court has corrected one slice of that distortion. The principle it has established, however, reaches well beyond accident compensation.

Insurance gap

Insurance has not moved with the law, and the ruling now makes that gap indefensible. A homemaker seeking life insurance faces a framework in which her sum assured is calculated not from her own economic contribution but from her husband’s income. IRDAI permits homemakers to hold term policies with sum assured typically pegged at 50-100 per cent of the earning spouse’s annual income. Her human life value, in the industry’s working model, is a derivative of his.

The Supreme Court has now established that her minimum contribution is ₹30,000 per month, ₹3.6 lakh per year, with legal authority behind it. The insurance framework has no coherent answer for why it should use a different number, or a different person’s number.

The coverage data reinforces the urgency. Three in four homemakers carry no critical illness cover. A 2022 Policybazaar survey of 5,000 respondents found that only 15 per cent of active term policies are independent homemaker plans, with most remaining either uninsured or covered only as an add-on to a spouse’s policy. Industry practice recommends term cover of ₹25-50 lakh for homemakers; actual coverage falls far short.

For the life insurance industry, the ruling is an instruction it should act on without waiting for a regulatory directive. Applying the standard Human Life Value methodology, capitalising ₹30,000 per month at six per cent, the accepted long-term safe rate in Indian insurance practice, the defensible term cover for a homemaker works out to ₹60 lakh. As two insurance professionals, we note this is conservative: let’s at least ensure now that a homemaker’s term policy should stand on its own sum assured basis, not as a satellite to her husband’s coverage.

Changes needed

Three changes follow directly. We should revise homemaker underwriting guidelines to treat ₹30,000 per month as the minimum validated income for Human Life Value computation, independent of the spouse’s earnings, with 10 per cent triennial indexation matching the court’s own mandate. Insurers should rebuild their HLV calculators on this basis and retrain distribution accordingly. The agent who tells a homemaker she does not need a policy of her own is now working against a Supreme Court ruling.

The ruling also opens a question the court’s framing cannot contain, and it is worth placing on record. The bench limited the homemaker definition to the traditional image of a woman, sociologically honest given how domestic care is distributed in India. But the principle it constructed rests on the replacement cost of domestic work, not on the gender of the person performing it. A man who manages the household and takes primary caregiving responsibility has an identical replacement cost. The court’s explicit limitation will be tested in litigation.

More pressingly, consider the adult male who does not earn at all: the job-seeker between placements or a young man yet to enter employment. For each of them, a court-validated ₹30,000 floor now exists for a non-earning woman performing domestic work. A MACT tribunal will be asked why an adult male who cooks, cares and maintains a household is valued below that floor.

Whether his non-earning status reflects circumstance, active job search, inadequate wages or family comfort are questions compensation proceedings cannot weigh.

The ruling, rightly focused on ending the undervaluation of women’s domestic labour, has by the force of its own principle opened a far wider debate about how Indian law values any life the market has failed to price, or has priced poorly.

Parliament and IRDAI have clear lanes: align insurance practice with the court’s recognition, extend social protection to caregiving, and examine pension credit for years spent outside the paid workforce. But the larger question the judgment raises belongs to all of us. The court has named the homemaker a nation builder. The financial architecture that surrounds her is yet to respond.

Kumar is former Managing Director of LIC and Sudhakar is former Executive Director of LIC. Views expressed are personal. All data are drawn from publicly available sources

Published on June 13, 2026