New Delhi, July 2 A plea has been moved in the Delhi High Court seeking directions from the Centre to consider constituting a welfare board for home nurses and domestic workers and also a committee for examining their situation in the national capital.
The civil writ petition, in the nature of Public Interest Litigation (PIL), moved by an NGO through advocates Robin Raju, Deepa Joseph, and Blessan Mathews, sought to highlight the pathos of home nurses and domestic workers, stating the pandemic brought to the fore their concerns.
The petitioner, Distress Management Collective has come across numerous grievances of these workers who had to face exploitation from the placement agency and the employer both, the plea stated.
Home nurses and domestic workers had to put their lives in jeopardy and ignored the well-being of their own families for taking care of the needs of their employers round the clock, it said, adding that it would be no exaggeration to state that lives of many elders were saved from the deadly Covid virus due to the care and protection rendered by this unsung group.
It is imperative to take note that home nurses, who are mostly females, often hail from poor and uneducated background and the agencies that hire them take advantage of this fact. The situation of domestic workers is not different either, it said.
The petitioner said that it has been made to understand by the victims of exploitation that the home nurse recruitment agencies take commission every month from their hard-earned monthly salary. This practice of taking a share from the salary every month must be deprecated and put to a halt, the plea contended.
Furthermore, the home nurses are often made to work without break. Many are hired on the condition that they have to take care of a bedridden patient 24x7 and this harsh condition is accepted out of compulsion.
The home nurses due to conditions put on them have to leave their homes and live with the patient. It is due to this that the need to ensure the safety of a home nurse gains relevance. A home nurse works under the constant fear thinking that if anything untoward happens to the patient they are taking care of, they would be the first on whom the family members of the patient would point finger at, it said.
It also said that in the recent past, the organisation has come across a number of complaints, particularly pertaining to non-payment of outstanding salaries, and in most cases, the recruitment agencies concerned abandon them.
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