The Hindi dictionary defines jodi as a pair. The dictionary points out that the word signifies symmetry.

However, in Surat’s textile industries and the powerloom clusters of Gujarat, jodi is used to describe a working arrangement where a man and a woman are hired together, made to work at the same time, in the same heat, at the same machine, and are paid together — one and a half wages. His is the full rate; her’s half.

The dictionary, evidently, has been economical with the truth.

The Equal Remuneration Act of 1976, the legislation that gave a solemn promise of equal pay for equal work to India’s women 50 years ago and was in line with the very spirit of the Constitution, never really managed to put an end to the jodi system. The reason is that the law was aimed at the formal sector wherein there are clear employer-worker relationships and wage registers are maintained.

Research published in the Indian Journal of Labour Economics shows that in Surat’s powerloom industry, where 70% of the workforce are migrants from Odisha’s Ganjam district, one of India’s stable labour-export corridors since Independence, women are recruited as jodis. This arrangement resulted not only in a gender wage gap but also in deprivation of income control.

In India, there is a very old tradition — older than the 1976 Act — of not really seeing the female worker. Colonial plantation records in Assam affixed the statutory minimum at five rupees per month for men and four rupees for women in the tea gardens, a wage gap entrenched not only in custom but also in law: legislative council records from the 1880s reveal that wages were frequently paid even below this minimum. The hazira
system, or daily payment, was applicable to women who worked the same hours in the same tea rows, but when they were recorded in the ledger, their entries, if made at all, were considered as lesser units.

Old tradition

The distance between Assam in 1885 and Surat in 2026 is certainly not only a matter of years. Plantation indenture was coercion supported by colonial criminal law. The jodi, on the other hand, is a voluntary arrangement, at least on paper. Apparently, the woman goes along with her husband willingly. It is here that the concept of choice vocabulary is most challenging. Does she go with him because migrants’ housing in Surat’s Ved Road is only given to male workers and the cost of private rentals is too high to be supported by a single income? Or is she employed because contractors won’t accept the man alone? They need two workers to get 1.5 wages, which is the profit-making formula. The woman has no independent wage record, no ESI registration in her own name, and no bargaining position of her own.

The new labour codes, which became effective last November, integrate the
Equal Remuneration Act within the Code on Wages, 2019. Besides that, social security is being provided for the very first time to gig and platform workers. They also include
the provision of night-shift safety for women in all industries. Such changes certainly matter.

But then, the jodi system raises an insistent challenge to such legislative assurance: if the worker who is supposed to be covered by the equal remuneration clause does not have any registered employment relationship, formal contract, employment record, just a husband whose wage she augments, then to whom exactly does the equal-remuneration provision apply?

India has had 50 years of equal remuneration law as well as the majority of a century’s worth of constitutional promises. But the jodi labour tradition is proof that it is easy to evade the law when the law cannot even see you and that the Hindi dictionary needs a revised entry.

Ankita Jain studies at Maharashtra National Law University, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar