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The Supreme Court’s judgment in Shishupal @Shish Ram vs Surjeet by a Division Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N.K. Singh, is likely a landmark. The ruling originated as the Court revised compensation granted by the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT) for a road accident in 2001. The first MACT awarded the family of Reshma, the accident victim, ₹2.42 lakh, which the Punjab and Haryana High Court revised in 2024 to ₹8.43 lakh. But in its order, the Court revised it to ₹62.78 lakh after attaching a sum of ₹30,000 a month to Ms. Reshma’s ‘economic value’, for the service she rendered as a homemaker. The ruling is not surprising. In Lata Wadhwa (2001), the Court valued a homemaker’s services at a modest ₹3,000. In Kirti vs Oriental Insurance (2021), it said the economic value of a homemaker’s work cannot be discounted simply because it is unpaid or performed by women. However, the ‘official’ value attached to that work has suffered from inconsistent quantification. The Bench’s value of ₹30,000 a month is itself notional and a floor; it added that the floor must be hiked by 10% every three years and a woman’s salary, where applicable, has to be added to the floor, in the context of MACT’s claims. The judgment does not create a salary, wage entitlement, pension scheme or employment relationship for homemakers, and applies to compensation calculations in MACT cases only. That said, the now-normalised societal tendency to undervalue women’s work means that any advance is valuable and will likely have ripple effects.

The connection between unpaid domestic labour and suppressed female labour force participation is a major theme in contemporary Indian labour economics. Now, for example, homemakers seeking maintenance under the Hindu Marriage Act, say, have judicial reasoning supporting the economic value of their domestic work. Rural women who “assist in sowing, harvesting, and cattle-tending”, as the Court noted, can now invoke the Court’s reasoning to pitch to have their labour, which is often treated as being incidental to household work, valued higher. The additive rule may encourage litigants to invoke similar reasoning in employment disputes vis-à-vis ‘work from home’ arrangements and domestic responsibilities. Future litigation may test whether male homemakers can claim equivalent treatment. Motor insurance is already a low-margin segment for many insurers, and a large increase in the average claim size — likely applied retrospectively as well — may force companies to reassess their risk models and render them more inclined to settle claims quickly in Lok Adalats. All said, the Shishupal judgment is a vital corrective to decades of economic erasure.