Every morning for six years, Kavita Solanki left her home in Nikol at 7:15 am to reach a flat in Satellite by 8 o’clock sharp. However, she didn’t have a key. So she’d wait outside — sometimes five minutes, sometimes thirty — until someone inside woke up or the building guard let her in. On some mornings, the family had left early without telling her. She’d stand there, having already paid for an auto, with nowhere to go and no way to recover that morning’s wages.
To make matters worse, there was no written agreement, no fixed salary date, and no policy on leaves. Instead, there was just an understanding — loose, unspoken, and entirely on the employer’s terms.
“Agar ghar mein kuch bhi hua – mehman aaye, bacha beemar pada, memsaab ka mood kharab tha — toh uska asar mere par toh padta hi tha,” she says. In other words, if anything happened in that household — guests arrived, the child fell sick, the employer was in a bad mood — the weight of it somehow landed on her.
Importantly, this is not a story about a cruel employer. Rather, it’s a story about a system that was never designed to protect the person at its bottom. And Kavita is far from alone in it.
The Invisible Workforce Behind Ahmedabad’s Urban Homes
India has an estimated 30 million domestic workers — more than the entire population of Australia. As a result, it is one of the largest employment categories in the country and among the least protected. Kavita is one of them. In cities like Ahmedabad, where nuclear families, dual-income households, and long commutes have become the norm, domestic workers are not a luxury. In fact, they are infrastructure.
And yet, the system governing their work in 2025 looks almost identical to what it looked like in 1995.
There are no written contracts, no guaranteed minimum wage enforcement, and no fixed working hours. Furthermore, workers have no recourse when things go wrong. The Code on Wages (2019) technically covers domestic workers under its minimum wage provisions. However, in practice, enforcement at the household level is virtually nonexistent. In fact, only 24 out of India’s 36 states and union territories have notified a specific minimum wage for domestic workers. This means a significant part of the country has no legal floor at all.
In Gujarat, the minimum wage for unskilled workers currently stands at over ₹11,000 per month. By contrast, most domestic workers in Ahmedabad earn between ₹4,000 and ₹8,000 working for a single household. That is roughly half of what the law intends, with no clarity on what happens when the family goes on vacation, the school year ends, or the lease isn’t renewed.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t just money. Rather, it is structure. Or more precisely, the complete absence of it.
What “Depending on One Family” Actually Means
When people talk about the informal nature of domestic work, it often sounds abstract. In practice, it looks like this:
Kavita was expected to stay late during Diwali cleaning week — three extra hours each day for five days, with no additional pay. She did it because she didn’t want to lose the job. After all, saying no had consequences she simply couldn’t afford.
Similarly, when she took two days off because her mother was hospitalized, the employer deducted four days from her salary — two for the absence, two as a “penalty.” There was no document to refer to and no process to dispute. So she accepted it.
Then, when the family’s son returned from studying abroad and brought a girlfriend home, Kavita was quietly told not to come on certain mornings, without any wage compensation for those lost days.
Each of these incidents, individually, seems small. However, cumulatively, they represent a working life in which she had no floor — no minimum below which things could not sink.
Moreover, what makes this harder to talk about is the invisibility of the labour itself. According to the MoSPI Time Use Survey 2019 — the most comprehensive study of how Indians actually spend their days — women in India spend an average of 299 minutes every day on unpaid domestic work. Men average just 97 minutes. As a result, the domestic worker who makes those 299 minutes possible for urban working women is, ironically, one of the least valued people in the entire chain.
“Ek baar memsaab ne bola, agle mahine se kam kaam hai, aadhe wakt k liye chahiye.” In other words, the employer said there’s less work — only half the time needed from next month onwards. There was no notice period and no conversation. Instead, it was just a new reality, delivered like a weather update.
Consequently, she started looking for alternatives — not because she was ambitious, but because she was simply exhausted by instability.
A Different Kind of Work
In late 2025, Kavita heard about Naibeau from a woman in her neighborhood — a domestic worker who had recently switched.
Initially, her reaction was skepticism. The model sounded strange to her. Work for multiple families, in different homes, for short durations? How would she know the homes were safe? What if a customer complained? What if she didn’t get enough bookings on a given day?
Nevertheless, she asked these questions out loud, got clear answers, and joined anyway.
The onboarding process took a week. Specifically, there was a training program — basic but genuinely useful: how to handle different cleaning tasks, how to use the app, what to do if a customer behaves inappropriately, how to mark a job complete, and when payment would arrive. Finally, she received a uniform on the last day of training.
She had not been given a uniform in six years of domestic work. As a result, she stood in front of the mirror in her small kitchen and looked at herself for a moment longer than usual.
It is also worth noting that what makes this harder to talk about is the invisibility of the labour itself. According to the MoSPI Time Use Survey 2019 — the most comprehensive study of how Indians actually spend their days — women in India spend an average of 299 minutes every day on unpaid domestic work. Men average just 97 minutes. Consequently, the domestic worker who makes those 299 minutes possible for urban working women is, ironically, one of the least valued people in the entire chain.
“Ek baar memsaab ne bola, agle mahine se kam kaam hai, aadhe wakt k liye chahiye.” In other words, the employer said there’s less work — only half the time needed from next month. There was no notice period and no conversation. Instead, it was just a new reality, delivered like a weather update.
As a result, she started looking for alternatives — not because she was ambitious, but because she was exhausted by instability.
“Pehli baar lag raha tha ki yeh ek naukri hai. Pehle toh bas ghar ka kaam tha.” In other words, for the first time, it felt like a real job. Before, it was just housework.
What Her Week Looks Like Now
Kavita works five days a week, averaging four to five bookings per day in areas within a few kilometers of her home. Her schedule is not fixed by someone else — it’s built by her, within the structure the platform provides.
On Monday, she had three bookings: a kitchen clean in Bopal at 9 am, dishwashing and mopping for a family in Bodakdev at 11, and a full home clean in Navrangpura at 2 pm. She was back home by 5:30.
On Wednesday, her younger daughter had a parent-teacher meeting at noon. She marked herself unavailable on the app from 11 am to 2 pm. She attended the meeting. No one needed to be informed. one’s permission needed to be sought. No wages were docked.
This is what flexibility looks like when it’s real rather than promised.
Her monthly income has roughly doubled compared to what she earned before — from around ₹6,500 working for one family to over ₹13,000 across multiple bookings. The payment arrives in her bank account on a fixed date. There are no deductions she didn’t agree to. There is a grievance process, a number to call, and a person to speak to in case something goes wrong during a booking.
“Paise toh zyada hain hi,” she says matter-of-factly. The money is more, yes. “Par sabse bada fark yeh hai ki ab mujhe dar nahi lagta.” But the biggest difference is that I’m no longer afraid.
The Safety Question Nobody Asks Openly
There is a conversation about safety in this industry that is almost always framed in one direction: are these workers safe for us to let into our homes?
The other question – “Are these homes safe for the workers?” gets asked far less often.
Domestic workers in India, the overwhelming majority of whom are women, enter private homes alone, often with no one else present, for hours at a time. They have no colleagues, no HR department, no visible presence of an organization standing behind them. When something goes wrong, like verbal abuse, wage theft, or physical harm, there is typically no mechanism to report it, no record of the incident, and no consequences for the person responsible.
The scale of this problem is genuinely underreported. The ILO’s Domestic Workers Convention (No. 189), which establishes international standards for the protection of domestic workers, has been ratified by 35 countries worldwide. India is not among them. In the absence of formal legal protections, the home remains one of the least regulated workplaces.
Naibeau’s model changes this in small but meaningful ways. Every booking is logged. The customer’s identity is verified. There is an in-app SOS feature that alerts the operations team in case of distress. Workers can flag incidents, and there is follow-up. It is not a perfect system, no system in an early stage is, but it is a system that is more than most domestic workers have ever had.
For Kavita, the safety question is simpler than it sounds. “Pehle kisi ek ghar pe kuch hota toh main kya karti? Kahan jaati?” Before, if something happened in one home, what would I do? Where would I go? “Ab company hai. Koi hai sunn’ne ke liye.” Now there’s a company. There’s someone to listen.
What the Numbers Say About This Shift
The market these platforms are operating in is not small. Urban Company estimates the home cleaning services market in India at approximately $9 billion, spread across 53 million urban households. Ahmedabad, with a population of over 8 million and one of Gujarat’s most rapidly growing urban middle classes, represents a significant, largely untapped share of that population. The city’s share of this market, even conservatively estimated, runs into hundreds of crores annually, almost entirely unorganized.
More relevant for workers: data from similar platforms operating in Mumbai and Delhi suggests that the structured on-demand model delivers monthly earnings 40–60% higher than those from single-household informal employment. The difference comes not from higher hourly rates alone, but from utilization, more working hours across the week, fewer dead days waiting to be let in, and more predictable income from month to month.
Put plainly: a domestic worker earning ₹6,000–8,000 a month in informal single-household employment in Ahmedabad can realistically earn ₹12,000–15,000 or more through a structured platform without working longer hours, simply by working more efficiently within a managed system.
For a city like Ahmedabad, where the culture of domestic help is deeply embedded, but the infrastructure around it has never been formalized, this represents a genuine structural shift and not just a new app.
If You’re a Domestic Worker in Ahmedabad Reading This
Kavita’s story is representative of what many women who work with Naibeau have experienced. The details vary across neighborhoods, families left behind, and reasons for making the switch. But the underlying shape of the story is consistent: a working life that was entirely at someone else’s discretion, and a different kind of work that put some of that control back in their hands.
If you currently work for one or two households in Ahmedabad and want to understand what working with Naibeau looks like — the pay structure, the areas currently covered, the onboarding process — you can reach out directly. There’s no pressure, no commitment required to ask questions.
The work itself won’t change. The floor beneath it will.
Naibeau is an Ahmedabad-based on-demand home services platform that connects trained domestic workers with urban households. Currently operational in select areas of Ahmedabad, with new partner onboarding open.