​Step forward: On the Shishupal judgment

The Supreme Court’s judgment in Shishupal @Shish Ram vs Surjeet by a Division Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N.K. Singh, is likely a landmark. The ruling originated as the Court revised compensation granted by the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT) for a road accident in 2001. The first MACT awarded the family of Reshma, the accident victim, ₹2.42 lakh, which the Punjab and Haryana High Court revised in 2024 to ₹8.43 lakh. But in its order, the Court revised it to ₹62.78 lakh after attaching a sum of ₹30,000 a month to Ms. Reshma’s ‘economic value’ , for the service she rendered as a homemaker. The ruling is not surprising. In Lata Wadhwa (2001), the Court valued a homemaker’s services at a modest ₹3,000. In Kirti vs Oriental Insurance (2021), it said the economic value of a homemaker’s work cannot be discounted simply because it is unpaid or performed by women. However, the ‘official’ value attached to that work has suffered from inconsistent quantification. The Bench’s value of ₹30,000 a month is itself notional and a floor; it added that the floor must be hiked by 10% every three years and a woman’s salary, where applicable, has to be added to the floor, in the context of MACT’s claims. The judgment does not create a salary, wage entitlement, pension scheme or employment relationship for homemakers, and applies to compensation calculations in MACT cases only. That said, the now-normalised societal tendency to undervalue women’s work means that any advance is valuable and will likely have ripple effects.