In India, $1 housekeepers spark a consumer, worker frenzy despite safety risks

At Indian startup Pronto’s training hub, women hone their chopping and mopping skills while learning how to send SOS signals if they feel unsafe inside customers’ homes. They are set to join India’s newest consumer craze: house help for $1 an hour. Indu Jaiswar, 35, hopes doing household chores in her first job can help fund her son’s dream of becoming a doctor.

“This ‌is what we’ve been doing in our own homes for years. Might as well get paid for it,” said the mother of two. In a country with an entrenched culture of outsourcing household work, Indian startups Pronto and ‌Snabbit and listed rival Urban Company are training thousands of domestic helpers.

Urban Company estimates India’s rapidly growing cleaning services market is worth an estimated $9 billion and spread across 53 million households. Like Uber drivers, the helpers receive bookings on their apps, directing them to apartments in assigned neighbourhoods within minutes and ​press a countdown timer in their apps before starting work. The potential annual earnings from working eight hours a day can be as high as $5,000 – a figure that far surpasses India’s per capita income of around $3,000.

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The companies are betting big, burning millions of dollars to lure busy professionals in cities like New Delhi and Mumbai with under 99 rupee ($1) offerings that have no global parallel. Similar services can cost around $30 an hour in the United States, and around $7 in China. However, the craze among consumers and workers is tempered by concerns about women’s safety in a country with high rates of sexual harassment.

Unlike e-commerce couriers who spend just brief moments at doorsteps, housekeepers may spend hours inside private homes, exposing them to greater risks. Soumya Chauhan, a principal at Dutch e-commerce investor Prosus, which has a ‌stake in Urban Company, said she views worker safety as the fundamental operational challenge ⁠to solve. “The platforms that successfully crack the safety protocols will earn the deepest consumer loyalty and the most sustainable market returns,” she said.

Cognisant of the challenges for a business that mainly employs women, Snabbit and Pronto said they have an in-app SOS button that alerts area supervisors in case of distress, while Pronto also offers self-defence training. “In the offline world, the rate of abuse for ⁠a lot of these domestic workers is super high,” said Pronto’s 23-year-old CEO Anjali Sardana, adding that her company is trying to comfort its workers by assuring legal and medical support when needed. Urban Company, which also offers services like plumbing, declined to comment for this story.

It has previously said it offers a women-only safety helpline and an SOS app feature. Shabnam Hashmi, a women’s rights activist, said the companies run extensive background checks on workers before onboarding them but should also check customer credentials. Currently users can simply log in on apps to book ​home ​help.

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