I have been raised lazy. I'm not trying to explain away my laziness, but trying to give context. In my middle class south Indian background with a working mother, there was always a domestic help around during my childhood. Going to the US when I hit 20, I had to do all my household chores by myself. But because I was only doing it for myself, and not a family of four, I found it do-able. But it was a nuisance. And it opened my eyes to how most of the middle class in the developed world lived - sans domestic help. And ever since, I have been waiting for the women in India drop their brooms and mops and say- "We don't want to work as domestic helps anymore." Because that day is coming. Maybe even within our lifetimes.
My mother's maids educated their daughters. My own maid's daughter has a degree, is working in a BPO and is actively encouraging her mother to stop working as a domestic help. My former maid, who took a career break a few years ago to go to her native place to take care of her ailing father, once she came back and saw that all the houses she worked at had gotten others to fill her shoes, decided to take an alternate path. She has taken up work as housekeeping staff at a corporate office. The hours are strict, but the pay is good, she has colleagues she hangs out with at break time and she gets health insurance so she can go to a private hospital for treatment while before, she had to go to the government hospital and be ill-treated.
The country is trying to educate as many women as possible and the economy is booming. Many middle class working women in certain urban pockets are finding it hard to get affordable domestic help. This is mainly due to the fact the area around them maybe too posh/too expensive to have any lower-middle or lower income living pockets nearby. Since availability becomes an issue/ demand becomes high, and the few women willing to make the trip into those posh areas drive up the salaries, and the comparatively not as rich households there cannot afford to pay the salaries demanded by the domestic helps. So they learn to do without domestic helps.
As for the domestic helps themselves, if a woman has school going kids, has larges swathes of the day free and has a mind to work, there are plenty of opportunities for her now that she didn't have a few decades ago. Is it any wonder that more and more women prefer to work in garment/glass/ceramic/plastic/fill-in-industry-of choice factories than to work as a domestic help? Especially if they get skilled in their profession of choice and can command a good pay check, why would they ever go back to working as domestic helps? Because lets face it, this is an unregulated industry - and the people employing the domestic helps aren't always good employers. For every lazy/incompetent/sticky fingered domestic helps story you hear, there are equal number of draconian/bigotted/kanjoos/demanding more than they pay for- employer stories.
If there's anything that the COVID lockdowns have taught people, its that self- reliance is the best. Many domestic helps I know have taken up alternate careers after the lockdowns. Many middle-class working women I know have tech-ed up their houses and have stopped having domestic helps. I'm not saying that the whole system of having household help is going to stop anytime soon. We still have a long way to go to ensure that every girl child gets educated. But looking at every other "developed" country around, this system will stop one day, and it's coming sooner rather than later.
