The 26-week paid maternity leave is actually counter-productive

Women activists who last week intuitively hailed the doubling of paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks may discover that this amendment to the Maternity Benefits Act, 1961, is unlikely to serve the cause of gender equity in the long run. The counter-factual argument has less to do with the position that offering a woman half a year of maternity leave is unnecessary; on the contrary, the Bill aligns with the health ministry’s recommendation for breastfeeding for six months, critical in a country where infant health and survival remain a matter of concern. The problem, perhaps, lies in the coverage of the enhanced leave to commercial establishments employing 10 workers; for those with more than 50 women, crèche services are mandatory. Although these provisions may attract admiration for the degree to which they have put India on a par with developed countries, they ignore the hard business reality of doing business anywhere in the world and certainly in India.

Anyone running an establishment with small numbers of employees knows that it is flat-out impractical, much less affordable, to support a non-working employee for more than half a year on full benefits. In an increasingly competitive and fast-paced business environment, small and medium firms cannot reasonably be expected to sustain the resultant productivity losses. Thus, it is easy to predict that these stipulations will discourage small businesses from hiring women altogether or making women employees more vulnerable to layoffs and lower pay than they already are. Given that small businesses, especially start-ups, are often the entry point for women in the workforce, this implicit discrimination will do irreparable harm to the cause of gender integration. India already boasts of a low, and falling, rate of women’s participation in the workforce at 27 per cent. Parliament would have done better to have had a higher threshold for extended maternity leave, limiting it to firms that have the financial wherewithal and bench strength. It is possible, for instance, for Nestle India to offer its female employees 24 weeks of paid maternity leave as it announced in February last year. But this multinational employs over 7,000 people. 

The criticism that a higher cut-off creates two classes of beneficiaries can be countered by the fact that this differential exists anyway, since the law covers only the organised sector, leaving out the countless women workers in the unorganised sector. The affluent West, especially Scandinavia, may be a standard-bearer of best practices in women’s rights, but it is important to recognise that those enormously generous maternity and paternity benefits stem from a desire for population growth. In that sense, they cannot be retrofitted on a country with the world’s second largest population. In fact, the more praiseworthy aspect of the new law is that it limits the enhanced benefits to two children. This has been widely and erroneously criticised as being akin to China’s coercive one-child policy. On the contrary, the government is well within its rights to mandate some level of family planning, which also has the effect of protecting women’s health. A simultaneous education campaign for contraception will, in fact, be constructive in spreading the message.