Due to COVID-19 pandemic hundreds and thousands of workers worked from home. Which of the following can allow

Question

Q. Due to COVID-19 pandemic hundreds and thousands of workers worked from home. Which of the following can allow work from home ? I. IT sector II. Bidi Industry III. Maruti factory IV. All Government firms (A) I and II (B) I and IV (C) II and III (D) I, II, III and IV

CBSECBSE Class XII Board 2024MCQ· 1mImportance★★★★★

🔒 Locked · start free trial →

You're viewing a preview — the full solution, concept, methods & PYQ mapping are locked.

Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →

Concept understanding — Home Based Work Definition

Home Based Work: A First Look

Think about the work you see happening around you every day. A tailor stitching clothes in a small room attached to their house. A woman rolling papads in her kitchen to sell to a local shop. A family assembling electronic components at a dining table. This is home based work — and it is one of the oldest, most widespread, and most invisible forms of employment in India.

The Everyday Intuition

You already understand the core idea without knowing the term. Home based work is simply any paid work that a person does from their own home, rather than going to a factory, office, or shop. The home becomes the workplace. The kitchen table becomes the production line. The verandah becomes the packaging unit.

But here is where it gets interesting — and where the definition becomes precise.

The Precise Meaning

In the context of Indian labour studies and policy (including the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act and ILO conventions), home based work has a specific, three-part definition:

Important

Home based work means work carried out by a person in their own home or in premises of their choice (other than the employer's workplace), for remuneration, and which results in a product or service as specified by the employer, regardless of who provides the equipment, materials, or inputs.

Three elements matter here:

Location: The work happens at home, not at the employer's factory or office. This is the defining feature.
Payment: It is not unpaid domestic labour or household chores. The person receives wages or piece-rate payment for what they produce.
Employer relationship: The worker does not sell their own product independently. They work on order from someone else — a contractor, a middleman, a company — who specifies what to make and often supplies the raw materials.

This last point is crucial. A woman who makes pickles and sells them at the local market is a self-employed entrepreneur. A woman who makes pickles at home for a brand that gives her the spices, bottles, and labels, and pays her per jar — she is a home based worker.

Why This Distinction Matters

Home based work sits at the intersection of several important realities:

It is part of the informal economy. Most home based workers have no written contract, no paid leave, no pension, no job security. They are invisible in official employment statistics because they do not "go to work."

It is overwhelmingly done by women. Cultural norms, household responsibilities, and lack of safe transport push women into work they can do from home. This makes home based work a gendered issue — it provides income but often at the cost of low wages, isolation, and no career progression.

It is a global phenomenon, but especially significant in India. From garment stitching in Delhi to bidi rolling in West Bengal, from agarbatti making in Tamil Nadu to embroidery in Lucknow — millions of households depend on this work.

A Few Key Points to Remember …

Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →

Work-from-home feasibility depends on whether tasks require physical presence at a production site or can be performed remotely; IT sector work is inherently digital and portable, while bidi-making has historically been done as home-based piecework, making (A) I and II the correct answer.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a global reckoning with where work actually needs to happen. For the first time, millions discovered that their office desks were not as essential as they had seemed. But this shift was never going to be universal—some work is tied to place, machinery, or physical materials in ways that no video call can overcome.

The IT sector stands as the poster child for remote work. Software development, coding, system administration, data analysis, customer support—all of these tasks require only a computer, internet connectivity, and access to cloud infrastructure. An engineer in Bangalore can push code to a server in California without leaving her bedroom. The nature of digital work is that the product itself—lines of code, database queries, user interfaces—exists nowhere and everywhere at once. IT companies were among the first to send employees home in March 2020, and many have since adopted permanent hybrid or remote models.

The bidi industry presents a less obvious but equally valid case. Bidi-making has long been organized as home-based work, particularly for women in rural and semi-urban India. Workers collect raw materials—tendu leaves, tobacco—and roll bidis at home, often involving family members in piecework arrangements. This is not a pandemic innovation but a century-old production model. The work requires no factory floor, no heavy machinery, only nimble fingers and a small workspace. Contractors supply materials and collect finished bidis, paying per thousand pieces. So bidi production was already "work from home" long before the term became fashionable.

Now consider a Maruti factory. Automobile manufacturing is an assembly-line process. Robots weld chassis, workers bolt engines, paint booths spray coats in controlled environments, and quality checks happen on the factory floor. You cannot assemble a car from your living room. The machinery, the scale, the coordination of hundreds of simultaneous tasks—all of this demands physical presence. A Maruti plant in Gurgaon cannot function with workers logging in from home. …

Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →

Same / Similar Concept — real previous-year questions on the same or a closely similar concept, not this exact question.

CBSE 2024Set 62/RQPS/41 markMCQ
$Q. Due to COVID-19 pandemic hundreds and thousands of workers worked from home. Which of the following can allow work from home ? I. IT sector II. Bidi Industry III. Maruti factory IV. All Government firms (A) I and II (B) I and IV (C) II and III (D) I, II, III and IV$
›Reveal solutionSolution

Work-from-home feasibility depends on whether tasks require physical presence at a production site or can be performed remotely; IT sector work is inherently digital and portable, while bidi-making has historically been done as home-based piecework, making (A) I and II the correct answer.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a global reckoning with where work actually needs to happen. For the first time, millions discovered that their office desks were not as essential as they had seemed. But this shift was never going to be universal—some work is tied to place, machinery, or physical materials in ways that no video call can overcome.

The IT sector stands as the poster child for remote work. Software development, coding, system administration, data analysis, customer support—all of these tasks require only a computer, internet connectivity, and access to cloud infrastructure. An engineer in Bangalore can push code to a server in California without leaving her bedroom. The nature of digital work is that the product itself—lines of code, database queries, user interfaces—exists nowhere and everywhere at once. IT companies were among the first to send employees home in March 2020, and many have since adopted permanent hybrid or remote models.

The bidi industry presents a less obvious but equally valid case. Bidi-making has long been organized as home-based work, particularly for women in rural and semi-urban India. Workers collect raw materials—tendu leaves, tobacco—and roll bidis at home, often involving family members in piecework arrangements. This is not a pandemic innovation but a century-old production model. The work requires no factory floor, no heavy machinery, only nimble fingers and a small workspace. Contractors supply materials and collect finished bidis, paying per thousand pieces. So bidi production was already "work from home" long before the term became fashionable.

Now consider a Maruti factory. Automobile manufacturing is an assembly-line process. Robots weld chassis, workers bolt engines, paint booths spray coats in controlled environments, and quality checks happen on the factory floor. You cannot assemble a car from your living room. The machinery, the scale, the coordination of hundreds of simultaneous tasks—all of this demands physical presence. A Maruti plant in Gurgaon cannot function with workers logging in from home. …
Start your 14-day free trial to see the full solution →

Q.Due to COVID-19 pandemic hundreds and thousands of workers worked from home. Which of the following can allow work from home ? I. IT sector II. Bidi Industry III. Maruti factory IV. All Government firms (A) I and II (B) I and IV (C) II and III (D) I, II, III and IV

🎓Unlock everything free for 14 days

Unlock everything free for 14 days