BehanVox: The Invisibility Of Care Work
This week in BehanVox: India's stunning win in the Women’s World Cup semi-final, a new cooperative taxi app, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! We kick off our new Carework Vertical, a long-term project to expand how we understand, report, and talk about ‘care’ in India, through data, stories, and lived experiences – from the margins and frontlines.
We also asked our readers on our social media platforms on the words and expressions they used to talk about care in their own language. In Odia it is called “bhala manda bujhiba’ and in Bangla, readers say, ‘dekha shona’ or ‘jotno’ depending on the context. In the Paite language, ‘kem’ is the word, said one of our readers Ninglun Hangal. These are early responses that will help us build an Indian language lexicon of care, as we wrote in Postscript’s last edition.
This week we have a superb interview on what ails this most undervalued and underreported form of labour that is gendered and caste based in nature. And as always, gender news and reads from across the world.
Story So Far
It pretty much holds up all of humanity from birth to death and it is visible everywhere – homes, markets, institutions. It sees us through times of particularly vulnerable phases of life such as parenting, ageing, sickness and disability. It is exhausting and relentless and the demand for it is going to go up exponentially in the coming decades, But for all that it remains at all times devalued, exploitative and unrecognised.
Care work is hard to define because it spans such a large gamut of labour, a lot of which is emotional and familial and out of the ambit of state and even community intervention. It is paid, think of nurses and healthworkers, and unpaid, think of caregiving at home to the young and elderly. And this work in all its forms, was celebrated this week – October 29 is commemorated as the International Day of Care and Support.
Care work across the world is gendered labour – women perform 76.2% of the total amount of unpaid care work. And it is also one of the most underreported forms of work. Through reported stories and data based analyses, we at BehanBox have been writing extensively on the many aspects of carework – on time use patterns, the need to reimagine it, systemic injustices, and resistance movements among healthcare workers.
In our monthly ‘Behanbox Talkies’ we talk to Neetha N, a scholar and economist at Centre for Women’s Development Studies, on the many aspects of care work, its gendering and invisibility and how these can be changed. “Care is highly skilled work, not everyone can do it. Of course, people can be trained, but that doesn’t mean the work is unskilled. Yet societies and families and communities have always devalued it, treating it as if it’s no work at all,” says Neetha.
How do we put a value to this work? Not as per the tenets of the market system, says Neetha because it will never circle in all the nuances of this work. She believes that it will take state intervention to make a real difference. “There are areas the private sector will never invest in unless forced to. The State has to tax capital, mobilise enough resources, and prioritise care at social and community level. But resources have to be marshalled, and the State will have to push back and use the market’s capacity to fund this infrastructure,” says Neetha.
Read the interview here.
Talking Point
127, Not Out: With an unbeaten 127 runs off 134 balls, Jemimah Rodrigues led India into Women’s World Cup 2025 final, scoring a five-wicket win over defending champions Australia in Navi Mumbai on Thursday. Captain Harmanpreet Kaur made 89 as the team chased the highest target in women’s ODIs. In an emotional interview after the win, she spoke about the acute anxiety pangs she dealt with in the lead-up to the game. Fingers crossed now, for a Sunday finals win against South Africa.
Pay Gap: Women engaged in the services sector in rural India earn less than half what men do, revealed a NITI Aayog report, India’s Services Sector: Insights from Employment Trends and State Level Dynamics released Tuesday. The disparity exists even in urban areas, where women earn 84% of what men earn, it adds. “Between 2017–18 and 2023–24, male participation in services increased from 32.8 percent to 34.9 percent, while female participation declined from 25.2 percent to 20.1 percent,” the report said.
Promises, Promises: Japan’s first woman premier Sanae Takaichi had sworn to have significant female representation in her government, comparable to the levels in Iceland, Finland and Norway. But she appointed just two women to her cabinet. Satsuki Katayama, will be the first woman finance minister ever and Kimi Onoda will be the economic security minister in Takaichi’s 19-member cabinet.
Taxi App: Bharat Taxi, India’s first cooperative taxi service, designed to challenge private players such as Ola and Uber, has been launched by the Centre. It promises to hand all earnings to drivers. We had reported on this initiative in our in-depth reporting on what the closure of BluSmart meant to the livelihood dreams of the women drivers it had trained and employed.
BehanVox Recommends
Liberalism as Fascism’s Prefiguration: ‘What becomes of gender and sexuality amidst the collapse of the liberal world order?’ In this essay, Dr Abeera Khan from SOAS, University of London’s Department of Gender Studies examines our current moment as one after homonationalism, where ‘the sparse and vanishing wages of inclusion lie exposed.’
No Dignity in Death for Trans Persons: In Queerbeat, Sayantan Dutta and Ekta Sonavane bring us an in-depth look into the deaths of two trans women–one in Kolkata and another in Goa–reveals how trans people face systemic violence in death, as they do in life.
Farewell to Podemos: The new Equator magazine has some gorgeous essays, one of them is a memoir by Lilith Verstrynge, a former member of the left wing Spain’s Podemos party.
Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.
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