Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow by selecting the most appropriate option.

In the backdrop of International Women’s Day, amid the continuing global pandemic, India needs a discussion on reimagining the idea of home. The notions of stay-at-home and work-from-home dominated the narrative with the pandemic, and with it began the discussion on the increase in violence within the home. It was interesting to see that the Supreme Court recently proposed fixing a notional income for a homemaker, indicating that the law and courts value the labour, services and sacrifices of women. Domestic spaces have been transformed in multiple ways in the last few decades in Indian cities. One could go back to the sociological studies of the 1970s to 1990s on urbanisation, migration and nuclearisation of families to understand changes in the domestic space, from stay-at-home women performing all the household work to women shouldering the double burden of paid employment and housework. Over time, with grandparents or other relatives leaving the shared domestic space, the middle and upper-middle-class urban home started hiring part-time domestic help.

Education remained the one tool for social mobility, but women were still expected to use fairness creams to be marriageable. While many of these changes were sociologically explained as arising from emancipation, neither the Towards Equality Report of 1974 nor the Shram Shakti report of 1989 reinforced the transformation. In fact, gendered hierarchies and the sexual division of labour in Indian families became important areas of anthropological exploration.

In the past 20 years, the number of women opting for higher education has increased to 48.6%, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education (2018-19); the average age of marriage for women is 22.1 years as per a 2019 report of the ministry of statistics and implementation. As per Census 2011, only 5% of Indian marriages are inter-caste, while 93% of respondents of a Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy-administered study of 2018 said they had arranged marriages. Finally, as per a 2016 BBC report, the divorce rate in India is less than 1%. These figures have to be read simultaneously with the 2019 National Statistical office survey that states 92% of women in India take part in unpaid domestic work in homes in comparison to 27% of men.