‘Sarkar makes such a noise about it’

“I am always short of money,” Babita Mitra says of her struggles while planning a family budget. “I keep aside money for food and end up using it on medicines. Tuition money for my boys goes into buying rations. And every month, I have to borrow from my employers…”

The 37-year-old domestic worker earns barely 1 lakh rupees a year, her combined income from two of her employers in Kolkata’s Kalikapur locality. She migrated to the city from Asannagar in West Bengal’s Nadia district when aged just 10. “My parents couldn’t afford raising three children. So, I was sent off to Kolkata to work in the household of a family originally from our village.”

Since then, Babita has been a domestic worker in many households. The 27 union budgets during her time in Kolkata have changed little for her or any of India’s over (officially) 4.2 million domestic workers. Independent estimates of their number cross 50 million.

In 2017 Babita married Amal Mitra, a man in his late 40s living in Uchhepota panchayat’s Bhagabanpur locality in South 24 Parganas. Her responsibilities multiplied because her husband, a wage labourer in a factory, contributed little to running the household. It is largely her income that keeps the family of six afloat – two sons aged 5 and 6, a stepdaughter in her 20s, her mother-in-law, besides Babita and Amal themselves.

A Class 4 school dropout, Babita knows little about the two decades of ‘gender budgeting’ in India. Or about Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s notion of women-led growth in her 2025-26 Budget. But Babita’s quotidian wisdom shines through her response: “What’s the use of this budget that boasts about doing so much for women, when they have nowhere to turn to during hard times?” The memories of her ordeal during the COVID-19 pandemic remain vivid and sharp.

“Ota amar jibaner sabcheye kharap samay. Pete takhan dwitiyo santan, pratham jon takhano amar dudh khaay..sharire kono jor chhilo na. [That was the worst time of my life. I was pregnant with my second child, still breastfeeding the first one. I had no strength in my body”]. She chokes even now as she speaks. “I don’t know how I survived.”

"With this big stomach of mine in the last months of pregnancy, I had to walk for miles and wait in those long queues to get rations being distributed by charitable organisations, and a few kind people,” she says.

“The government washed its hands off by giving only 5 kilograms of free rice [under the PDS]. I did not even get the medicines and food [nutrition and protein supplements] that pregnant women are entitled to,” she says. The signs of anaemia and calcium deficiency caused by the malnutrition of the pandemic days still show on her hands and feet.

“A poor woman having no support from her parents or her husband’s family, should be looked after by the sarkar.” And then scoffs at the raised income tax exemption limit of Rs. 12 lakhs: “What about us? Don’t we pay tax for everything we buy? The government talks big, but all the money comes from the khajna [tax] we pay.” She pauses to take down the clothes drying in an employer’s balcony.

And puts a full stop to our discussion: “Sarkar gives what belongs to us and then makes such a noise about it!”