AMRITA SABNAVIS, a busy financier with two BlackBerrys, an equally hectic husband and a six-year-old daughter, refers to one of her former maids as “a nightmare”. Ms Sabnavis says the hired help was always on the phone, frequently late when collecting her daughter, and tried to discourage her second maid from doing any work. The servant then went on holiday in May and never came back. Ms Sabnavis has been through 11 live-in maids in three years in Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Finding replacements only seems to be getting harder.

India, like Britain and America until a century ago, has an established culture of live-in servants. Professional urban families often have a “maid”, usually a young migrant woman, who does everything from dusting to child care. Wealthier homes have an entourage stretching from sweeper to housekeeper. Gauri Singh, who runs a maid’s agency in Gurgaon, a city on Delhi’s outskirts, says households with a monthly income of 100,000 rupees ($1,850) or more typically have at least one live-in servant.

A glut of unskilled workers has long provided cheap labour. India’s latest employment survey in 2009-10 estimated that 2.7% of working Indians, or 10.4m people, worked in homes as maids, cooks, gardeners, and the like. The business is mostly unregulated, and the true figure is probably far higher. The International Labour Organisation says domestic workers account for 3.5-12% of the working population in developing countries, against less than 1% in rich countries.

Yet the culture may be changing. In Chennai, a commercial city in southern India, Bangalore, the country’s IT hub, and Goa, a coastal tourism hotspot, families also say it has become harder over the past five years to find live-in staff. Demand is rising as more women go out to work and fewer live in claustrophobic joint families where in-laws act as nannies. Yet supply is falling: 18% of urban women in the informal sector took up jobs as domestic workers in 2009-10, down from 27% five years earlier, according to a 2011 study led by a Harvard academic.

Economic liberalisation in the past two decades has created a wider range of low-skilled urban jobs. Malls need shop assistants. Offices need errand boys. In rural areas a job-creation scheme for poor households is keeping potential migrants at home. Meanwhile, middle-aged servants have invested in their children’s schooling so that their offspring do not follow in their footsteps. Pushpa Khude, a 45-year-old maid and cook in Mumbai, began watering plants at a Bollywood actor’s house at the age of seven. Her son is a bank manager and her daughter is studying commerce.

Servants, in turn, are more able than before to demand decent working conditions. In Chennai, says an employer, staff will refuse to work in a house without a washing machine or a food processor. The going monthly rate for a live-in maid or cook, who often works for more than 12 hours a day, six days a week, is still low: only 4,000-10,000 rupees ($73-184) in the cities. But wages appear to be rising, causing grumbles among employers.

Poor treatment is another deterrent. Even progressive families have an unwritten rule that servants should not sit on the same furniture or use the same crockery as their employers. Servants are vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse. Now India’s government is trying to boost servants’ rights. Domestic workers were added to a sexual-harassment bill approved in the lower house of parliament in September. Last year they were added to a free health-insurance scheme. And though the national minimum-wage law does not cover domestic workers, nine of India’s 35 states and union territories have included servants in local minimum-wage laws, says Saadya Hamdani of the International Labour Organisation. But the laws are impossible to enforce unless a domestic worker reports poor treatment.

The days of full-time skivvies are thus numbered. Increasingly, part-timers work at several houses for higher rates and fixed hours. Ms Singh’s 18-month-old agency, the Maids Company, requires clients to hire a domestic worker for a specific task or time slot. The agency has some 90 maids on its books and a waiting list of 60 employers. “Everyone calls and asks for a live-in [maid],” she says. “And then they grudgingly book a ten-hour package.”