Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to understand the ramifications of rural-urban migration in context of the domestic house-helps in urban areas by engaging with the middle class or upper middle class employer, the rural migrant domestic house help and the ‘placement agencies’ that bring the two together.

Paper long abstract:

The urban cityscape today is incomplete without the presence of domestic house-helps. A growing number of 'placement agencies' in cities like New Delhi too, points towards an expanding space accommodating migrant domestic workers in the urban scene. Delving into an interaction of local full time house helps, their urban middle class and upper middle class employers and the placement agencies, hence facilitates insight into- triggers to rural-urban migration, ways in which such 'agencies' mobilise as well as exert power over migrant labour, the nature of work and living conditions the rural migrants are faced with and the expectations and outlook of the employers. Hence, this web of employer-linking agency-employee relations exhaustively demonstrates the ways in which downward mobility and social inequality backed by regional as well as ethnic differences is reproduced in the urban set up. Through ethnographic accounts and intensive case studies, the paper situates the web of pressures faced by female full time house-helps in the economically unstable local environment on the canvas of an urban set up, exploring the ramifications of such a migration which takes place in the wake of an exponential growth of demands for labour in the urban households. The discussion follows the trail also looking at the ways in which these 'placement agencies', though holding no legal sanction, connect urban requirements to local disparity often in a questionable way.