Neo-liberal agendas that dictate policy and lawmakers are fundamentally at odds with exploitative market forms that reinforce gender, class and caste hierarchies. Activities that are not purely economic, such as the domestic work industry, are especially incompatible with faith in free market forces, given the popular market-oriented notions that inform the valuation of forms of ‘productive’ work. Any attempt for the State to intervene, has to be more facilitative than regulatory. There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way these systems are viewed and such work valued. This paper is an attempt to introduce, into the Indian policy sphere, a discourse on the need to understand the peculiarities of domestic care work and propose that any legislative intervention needs to be contextual, with a different understanding of the ‘worker’ and the ‘workplace’.