Rural and Migrant Mothers in India: The Hidden Crisis of Maternal Health and Labour

In one part of the country, a pregnant woman waits weeks for a bus to the nearest primary health centre. In another, a mother mixes cement barely a fortnight after childbirth, her infant asleep in a cloth sling tied to a scaffolding pole. Motherhood in India is not one experience. It is shaped, often brutally, by where a woman lives, what she earns, and which caste she is born into. For rural and migrant women, the joys of motherhood arrive bundled with risks that urban, middle-class mothers rarely have to think about.

The high cost of motherhood for rural women
Poverty, distance and the contraception gap
Unpaid labour and invisible work in agriculture
The double burden of fields and childcare
Migrant mothers: the struggle of urban labourers
Mothering other people’s children
Class and caste divides in childcare labour
Economic constraints and the weight of maternal responsibility

The high cost of motherhood for rural women

India has made real progress on maternal health, but the gains have been uneven. National data now shows more women than men in the overall population, with the sex ratio rising to 1,020 females per 1,000 males, largely driven by improvements in rural areas. Yet the sex ratio at birth tells a different story: only 929 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, a gap that points to continuing son preference and unequal investment in daughters from before they are even born.

Maternal deaths have also fallen sharply. The Maternal Mortality Ratio dropped from 130 to 93 deaths per lakh live births between 2014-16 and 2019-21, and the latest Registrar General data puts the figure at 88 for 2021-23. That is real progress, but it still sits above the Sustainable Development Goal target of 70, and national averages hide sharp state-level gaps. Women in poorer, less-developed states continue to die at far higher rates than women in Kerala or Tamil Nadu.

Poverty, distance and the contraception gap

Behind these numbers lies a familiar chain of disadvantage. Poor rural households often live far from functioning health centres, cannot afford transport in an emergency, and have limited access to contraception or family planning counselling. This isn’t simply a matter of ignorance. It is a matter of infrastructure, income and the time women are permitted to spend on their own health. When a woman cannot access contraception, pregnancies come at times she has not chosen, often in quick succession, straining her body and her household’s already thin resources. The result is a cycle where poor health, poor nutrition and repeated childbearing reinforce each other across generations.

Unpaid labour and invisible work in agriculture

Rural women are rarely just mothers. Most are also unpaid or underpaid agricultural workers, and this labour is where a second, quieter injustice plays out. India’s Time Use Survey shows that women spend close to 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work, compared to just 88 minutes for men, with women also putting in far more hours on caregiving for children and the elderly. These figures do not even fully capture what rural women actually do: fetching water and firewood, tending livestock, working in the fields, and caring for children, often simultaneously.

Official labour statistics tend to undercount this contribution because so much of it falls outside a formal wage relationship. A woman weeding a family field, or minding a toddler while cooking over a chulha, is rarely recorded as “working” in the way a factory shift is. This invisibility has consequences. It shapes how policy is designed, what gets subsidised, and whose labour is considered worth protecting.

The double burden of fields and childcare

For a rural mother, the demands of paid or subsistence labour and childcare compete constantly. There is rarely a creche in the field, and older siblings, sometimes barely older than the children they are minding, often step in as substitute caregivers. This leaves both the mother, who works long hours with little rest, and the child, who may go without adequate supervision, nutrition or stimulation, worse off. It’s not a failure of individual women. It is what happens when an economy depends on female labour without building any of the support structures that labour requires.

Migrant mothers: the struggle of urban labourers

The picture becomes starker for women who migrate from villages to cities in search of work, particularly in construction. Anyone who has walked past a building site in an Indian city has likely seen it: infants asleep on stacked bricks, toddlers wandering near open trenches, while their mothers carry loads of sand or mix concrete a few feet away. Laws like the Building and Other Construction Workers Act do require creche facilities at larger sites, but enforcement remains patchy and most legislation on childcare has historically applied only to the organised sector, leaving out the very women who need it most.

Non-profits have tried to fill this gap. Onsite daycare centres run by organisations such as Mumbai Mobile Creches now operate at construction sites, offering nutrition, basic education and a safe space for children while their mothers work. These interventions genuinely improve outcomes, but they reach only a fraction of the migrant workforce. For most migrant mothers, there is no institutional safety net, only whatever informal arrangement they can improvise with neighbours, older children or sheer luck.

Mothering other people’s children

Many migrant rural women eventually move from construction sites into domestic work in urban households, caring for the children of middle-class and upper-class families as maids and nannies. It is a strange inversion: a woman who cannot secure basic childcare for her own child spends her day providing exactly that for someone else’s. This arrangement is often described using the language of family, “she’s like family to us”, even as the wages, working hours and job security remain firmly those of an employee, not a family member.

Class and caste divides in childcare labour

This commodification of mothering does not happen in a caste-neutral way. Paid domestic work in India remains heavily structured by caste, with women from historically marginalised communities disproportionately performing the cleaning, cooking and childcare that upper-caste and upper-class households outsource. Scholars researching this sector note that the labour of Dalit-Bahujan women allows dominant-caste women to step back from household drudgery, even as the domestic workers themselves receive little recognition, security or fair compensation for work that is, in essence, mothering.

The irony is sharp. A domestic worker may spend her entire day nurturing another family’s children with patience, food and attention, only to return home too exhausted, and too poor, to give her own children the same. Her labour becomes a resource that wealthier households absorb, while her own family bears the cost of her absence. This is not a personal failing. It is what happens when care work is treated as a commodity that flows upward along lines of caste and class, rather than something every family, rich or poor, is equally entitled to support with.

Economic constraints and the weight of maternal responsibility

Across all these situations, rural women and their poor urban migrant counterparts share a common constraint: they are raising children with far fewer resources than the task demands. Limited access to healthcare, poor nutrition and inadequate education for their children are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of the same underlying inequality that denies these women contraceptive choice, safe workplaces and fair wages.

Government schemes such as the Janani Suraksha Yojana and the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana have tried to ease some of this burden through cash transfers linked to institutional deliveries and maternity support. The National Creche Scheme similarly aims to extend childcare to poor working mothers outside the organised sector. These are meaningful steps, but they remain patchworks stitched onto a much larger structural problem: motherhood, as an institution, continues to be shaped by patriarchal expectations that assume a woman’s labour, whether reproductive, domestic or economic, is simply available for the taking. Until policy addresses maternal health, childcare infrastructure and fair economic opportunity together, rather than as separate silos, rural and migrant mothers will keep bearing costs that no parent should have to carry alone.

What do you think? Should employers of domestic workers be legally required to provide for their employees’ own childcare needs, the way organised-sector creche laws already attempt to do? And what would it take, in policy or in practice, to make rural women’s agricultural and domestic labour visible enough to actually count?

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

Average rating 0 / 5. Vote count: 0

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

References

PDF 📄

Table of Contents

The high cost of motherhood for rural women 🔗

Poverty, distance and the contraception gap 🔗

Unpaid labour and invisible work in agriculture 🔗

The double burden of fields and childcare 🔗

Migrant mothers: the struggle of urban labourers 🔗

Mothering other people’s children 🔗

Class and caste divides in childcare labour 🔗

Economic constraints and the weight of maternal responsibility 🔗