Vanishing breed of domestic maids

Euphemistically called domestic helps, they seldom make any news unless something tragic happens to them. Also known as house maids, they are fast becoming short in supply. If one of the obvious reasons is employment opportunities for an increasing number of girls in garments factories, the other is certainly the breaking of the gender barrier in the country's farming occupation.
Three or four decades ago, women and girl farm labourers were a taboo. With the changing of the pattern of cultivation, more and more women and girls are now getting involved with on-field farming. Although there is wage discrimination between men and women for the same farm works, still women prefer to put in their labour beside men so that they can earn their own bread.
In a situation like this, it is only natural that girls are no longer interested to serve as house maids. After all, theirs is hardly any better than a slave's life. Even if they are not physically or sexually abused or just scolded, they live a confined life. Apart from the few hours' sleep, they are expected to be on duty all the time. Well, some of them get the opportunity of viewing the TV serials with the mistresses of their houses or else recreation is foreign to their daily routine.
If the breed of domestic helps is becoming a rarity, how do the idle or busy residents of the capital and other cities manage house-keeping? If permanent domestic housekeepers are unavailable, a variant of them has come to replace them. These are poor settlers in the city usually living in slums. Their husbands or male members of family do menial jobs such as rickshaw-pulling, masonry, hawking or vending etc.
These domestic helps are actually the driving engine of middle-class homes. The more affluent class still depend on house maids who can be recruited through their low-income employees such as drivers and gardeners. Also there are agents who supply such domestic helps. Now, most such temporary domestic helps serve two to four families a day. They have developed a kind of professionalism and can do the works very fast. In the early morning they would set out from their slums and spend one to three hours in a house depending on the works to be dome.
Now most such maids have their own tales to tell. Quite a few of such young or middle-aged domestic helps have broken families. Either their husbands have deserted them or in some cases died, leaving their spouses with children with no savings to fend for themselves. At times driven out of their husbands' homes in villages they prove to be a burden on their poor parents. They are compelled to come to the cruel and harsh world of the city. But it is not easy. Unless they have someone reliable in the city, their move to one such melting pot can be perilous.
Once they are in the city, they have to be smart by instinct simply for their self preservation. The maids become accustomed to this modern-day slavery. In the slums they have to appease bullies in order to ensure their shelter there. So the observation that wealth creation in society has contributed to a drastic drop in the number of permanent domestic maids is really arcane. Distribution of wealth has remained highly discriminatory and the poor are getting discriminated against as ever.