What is the measure of a person’s labour? And why is creativity valued more than physical labour? This episode of The Longest Constitution wades into intellectual property rights and the sexual reproductive autonomy of women, to examine the making of the Copyright Act, 1957 and the beginnings of the commercial surrogacy industry in the early 2000s. We also look at how women’s domestic labour, invisible and unrecognized, was finally evaluated following pleas for compensation following accidents and deaths in road accidents, under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988.

Reading material: Reddy, Prashant, T. and Sumathi Chandrashekaran, 2017, Create, Copy, Disrupt: : India's Intellectual Property Dilemmas, OUP: New Delhi.

Kotiswaran, Prabha, 2021, “An Ode to Altruism: How Indian Courts Value Unpaid Domestic Work”, EPW, Vol. 56, Issue No. 36. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/baby-manjis-case-throws-up-need-for-law-on-surrogacy/articleshow/3400842.cms

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