My PhD thesis is titled 'Women, Work and Life: A Case Study of Domestic Workers in India'. Herein, I examine how the everyday labour of women part-time domestic workers is organised across multiple employers and tasks, and how social structures of gender, caste and class operate within the state, market and family spaces to shape their labour market outcomes and experiences, livelihood security and agency. 

The core of my empirical analysis draws on fieldwork with 152 women domestic workers in Delhi, India, conducted independently between January and September 2023. Combining survey data with field observations and in-depth life histories, the study provides quantitative and qualitative evidence, including on the everyday organisation of work in the occupation, working conditions, earnings,  women’s employment histories, choices and perceptions, and household living conditions. The motivation for collecting primary data on part-time domestic workers stemmed from their limited visibility in India's official national employment statistics, which provided little information on this segment of the workforce and its employment arrangements. The thesis also analyses secondary data from the Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS), the Time Use Survey, and the proposed questionnaire for the All India Survey of Domestic Workers to identify these data gaps and explore ways to improve the measurement and representation of domestic work in official labour market statistics.

I have been actively engaged in fieldwork across several states in India as part of multiple projects/ studies focused on studying the working and living conditions of informal workers, especially women. Consequently, I have contributed as a field researcher for surveys conducted in Bihar, Delhi, Kerala, Punjab and Tamil Nadu.