Welfare Policy; (5) monitoring the cases of violence against the domestic workers and
ensuring prosecution of the perpetrators of such violence; (6) maintaining a list of
children in a register to be kept in every union parishad and obliging parents of young
children who send their children from rural to urban areas for work to register the details
of the child; (7) setting up a mandatory registration regime for child domestic workers
which would require all employers to register the details of children or other domestic
workers with local government units such as pourashava or municipal corporations
(though not union parishads);53 (8) expecting that the Government would take steps to
enact law requiring that the employers must ensure health check-up of domestic workers
once in every two months; (9) requiring that existing legal framework would be
strengthened in such a way that benefits of regulated working hours, rest, recreation,
salary etc. enjoyed by industrial workers are also ensured for all domestic workers; and
(10) requiring that laws would ensure proper medical treatment and compensation to be
paid by employers to the domestic workers for any illness, injury or fatality occurring in
the course of employment or as a result of it.54
Directions issued by their Lordships in this case follows an in-depth analysis of
the various ill effects of domestic works on the workers, is well-intoned, and based on a
genuine desire to ameliorate the working and living conditions of child domestic workers.
Hence, their Lordships must be lauded for taking a thorough view on an area that has
generally been neglected by the legislature. However, the wisdom behind some of the
directions, their desirability, or practicality is not beyond question. Some of the directions
are expressed in so broad and imprecise terms that whether or not those have been
implemented to any meaningful extent can hardly be assessed by any objective
53
The judgment does not give any justification for the exclusion of union parishads from the ambit of such
registration regime. Presumably, union parishads have been excluded because it has been assumed that
child domestic work is only an urban phenomenon or children working in rural areas would stay close to
their own families and so, they would be less vulnerable. However, such assumptions may not always be
correct as though they would reflect the common trend; their exceptions are also not rare.
54
BNWLA v Bangladesh, above note 10, at para 40.
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