top of page

By:

Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Trust Reset

As the recent protests over the NEET paper leak showed, India’s examination system has reached a point where incremental repairs are no longer enough. The appointment of a high-powered task force on examination reforms, headed by technology pioneer Nandan Nilekani, is therefore not merely an administrative response to the NEET-UG paper leak crisis but a concrete attempt to rebuild confidence in one of the country’s most important public institutions. Examinations are gateways to opportunity,...

Trust Reset

As the recent protests over the NEET paper leak showed, India’s examination system has reached a point where incremental repairs are no longer enough. The appointment of a high-powered task force on examination reforms, headed by technology pioneer Nandan Nilekani, is therefore not merely an administrative response to the NEET-UG paper leak crisis but a concrete attempt to rebuild confidence in one of the country’s most important public institutions. Examinations are gateways to opportunity, social mobility and professional ambition. For millions of students across the country, a competitive examination represents years of sacrifice by families and the possibility of a better future. When question papers leak repeatedly, evaluation systems fail or allegations of manipulation emerge, the resulting damage strikes at the idea of fairness itself. The crisis surrounding NEET-UG exposed uncomfortable vulnerabilities in the country’s examination infrastructure. The resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and the subsequent appointment of Pralhad Joshi with additional charge of the ministry underlined the political seriousness of the issue. But political accountability alone cannot fix a structural problem. That is why the composition of the new task force is a move on the right direction. It brings together expertise from technology, space research, intelligence, education administration and logistics. Nilekani’s appointment is particularly significant. The former Infosys chief executive and architect of Aadhaar has experience in building large-scale digital public infrastructure involving hundreds of millions of citizens. The Aadhaar project itself was born out of a similar challenge: how to create a reliable identity system in a country where leakages and duplication weakened welfare delivery. India’s examination system now requires the same kind of thinking. The committee’s mandate to examine the entire examination lifecycle - from question paper creation and distribution to candidate verification, evaluation and results - is the right approach. The problem lies in multiple weak points where human intervention, poor security protocols and outdated processes can create opportunities for malpractice. Technology will inevitably be central to the solution. Artificial intelligence can help detect unusual patterns, blockchain-based verification can strengthen record security and better data systems can improve transparency. But a secure examination system requires independent oversight, professional management, clear accountability and swift punishment for wrongdoing. India’s National Testing Agency was created to bring efficiency and standardisation to public examinations. Its credibility must now be restored through reforms that are visible and trusted by students. The Nilekani task force has been given the difficult job of repairing that trust. The government has chosen a committee led by people with experience of managing complex national systems. It is a sensible first step. The real test will now be whether its recommendations translate into action.

The Convenience Economy

India’s booming lifestyle management industry is a symptom of the state’s withdrawal from care infrastructure.

AI generated image
AI generated image

An IIT-founder CEO in Gurugram pays Rs. 1 lakh a month to a single person who manages his laundry, food, wardrobe, domestic staff training, and household repairs. In Bengaluru, a young professional couple uses a lifestyle management firm to coordinate their home schedules, travel bookings and vendor calls. These are not outliers but the visible edge of a formalising industry now present across India’s metros.


The lifestyle management market in India was valued at USD 2.8 billion in 2025. It is projected to reach USD 5.9 billion by 2034, growing at 8.6 percent annually, according to market research firm Dataintelo. Job portals currently list 1,094 lifestyle manager positions across India with 203 in Bengaluru alone. Salaries for these positions range from Rs. 16 lakh to Rs. 49 lakh annually, with an average of Rs 19.2 lakh.


Lifestyle managers handle tasks that should, in a functioning public infrastructure, be less burdensome. Eldercare, childcare coordination, household staff oversight. The wealthy have outsourced these to a professional class. Everyone else absorbs the work informally, mostly women.


The National Statistics Office Time Use Survey 2024 released by MoSPI in February 2025 shows women in India spend 289 minutes per day on unpaid domestic services, compared to 88 minutes for men. Women spend an additional 137 minutes daily on unpaid caregiving for household members, against 75 minutes for men. This is a structural transfer of public goods responsibility onto individual households, and within households, onto women.


The Ministry of Women and Child Development has estimated that women's unpaid domestic and care work represents 15 to 17 percent of India's GDP. India spends less than one percent of GDP on public care infrastructure. The arithmetic is not difficult.


Labour Hierarchies

The lifestyle management industry has formalised one tier of care work while leaving the other entirely unprotected. Lifestyle managers earn huge salaries and receive employment benefits. The domestic workers they are hired to supervise and coordinate fall into a completely different legal category.


India has between 25-80 million domestic workers depending on the estimate, making it the largest employer of domestic workers in the world. The country has not ratified ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, adopted in 2011. India supported the Convention at the International Labour Conference but has not enacted national legislation in the 15 years since. The government's stated reason is that existing legal frameworks do not meet C189’s requirements. It has not changed those frameworks either.


The four Labour Codes enacted from 2019 to 2020 include domestic workers in their scope but provide no specific enforcement mechanisms, wage floors, or social security pathways for this sector. Karnataka introduced a draft Domestic Workers Welfare Bill in 2025 that mandates employer registration, written contracts, and welfare fund contributions. It has not been implemented nationally. Tamil Nadu has a welfare board, but registration is low and minimum wage compliance is weak.


This two-tier structure is not accidental. JNU economist Avinash Kumar, quoted in a recent report, described the process as ‘precarisation’ where digital platforms, uniforms, and ratings systems create an appearance of formal employment without improving actual working conditions. The lifestyle management firm intermediates between the wealthy client and the domestic worker.


The UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 places India eighth among the ten most unequal countries in its sample of 56 nations. India’s Gini coefficient for wealth stands at 0.74, identical to the United States, a country with significantly higher average income and social protection spending. India added 39,000 dollar millionaires in 2024, bringing the total to 917,000. Over the same period, its real average wealth per adult declined.


Unprotected Workers

In India’s burgeoning lifestyle-management industry, clients pay anything between Rs. 15,000-1.5 lakh a month for convenience. Demand is buoyed by a rapidly expanding class of ultra-rich; Knight Frank expects India to record the world’s fastest growth in ultra-high-net-worth individuals between 2023 and 2028. Yet the workforce underpinning this economy remains largely unprotected, with no guaranteed minimum wage, weekly rest or access to provident-fund and insurance benefits without formal contracts. The Union Budget 2026-27 proposes training 1.5 lakh multiskilled caregivers, but leaves untouched the status of 10.4 lakh ASHA and 25 lakh Anganwadi workers, who continue to deliver frontline health and nutrition services as ‘volunteers’ rather than employees.


The E-Shram portal has expanded documentation of informal workers. Registration is not protection. A domestic worker registered on E-Shram has no legal wage floor if the state government has not notified one, no enforceable rest periods, and no grievance mechanism beyond civil courts that are inaccessible to workers paid Rs. 6,000 a month.


There is no GST enforcement mechanism for the premium lifestyle management market, no mandatory disclosure requirement for firms on how they classify and pay the workers they supply to clients, and no inclusion of domestic work in the Smart Cities Mission or affordable housing planning frameworks.


India’s female labour force participation rate was 25 percent in 2024 for women aged 15 to 59, up from 21.8 percent in 2019 per the NSO Time Use Survey. The gap with men, at 75 percent, remains 50 percentage points wide. Multiple studies link this gap directly to the unequal burden of unpaid care work. McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that robust investment in India’s care economy could increase GDP by 60 percent if women’s labour force participation reaches parity.


Instead, what is happening is a market solution for the top 0.1 percent and no solution for anyone else. The wealthy hire lifestyle managers. Everyone else absorbs the work. The state counts neither as an economic contribution nor a policy responsibility.


India’s lifestyle manager industry is not evidence of prosperity. It is evidence of what happens when public care infrastructure is absent, labour law excludes the most vulnerable workers, and wealth concentrates at a rate that allows a small fraction of the population to buy their way out of the obligations the state has not met.


(The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page