Paternity Leave In India May Just Be a Holiday For Men

After the recent passage of the maternity leave bill in Rajya Sabha, Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi has said that such a legislation will have little impact in India, where men do not even avail their existing leave entitlements to share the responsibility of child care. Maneka said, “Paternity leave can be considered only if, once the woman goes back to work after her 26 weeks of leave, we find that men are availing their sick leave for a month to take care of the child. Let me see how many men do that. I will be happy to give it but for a man, it will be just a holiday, he won’t do anything.”

The Ministry of Labour and Employment mooted the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which increases the period of leave for new mothers from the existing 12 weeks to 26 weeks in the organised sector. It also allows 12 weeks of leave to mothers going in for adoption or commissioning a child through surrogacy, and encourages employers to facilitate ‘work from home’ for new mothers.

The legislation would mean that India would join the ranks of Eastern European and Nordic countries that have the longest fully paid maternity leave. The demand for mandatory paternity leave has come from several women MPs as well as civil society members, who contend that merely increasing the leave for mothers could be counterproductive as it will reinforce the gender norm of women being the sole in-charge of child care and domestic work.

“If men gave me one iota of hope by taking sick leave for child care, then yes, we can think of mooting a proposal for paternity leave,” Maneka said.

Dismissing reports that the Union government will take the ordinance route to bring the Bill into immediate effect, Maneka said that the Maternity Benefit Bill will have to wait to be passed in Lok Sabha until the winter session of Parliament.

The WCD Ministry, meanwhile, is planning on introducing “safeguards to prevent any misuse of the maternity bill”. These include making it mandatory for women to work for a stipulated amount of time before they can avail the enhanced leave. “It could be one year; we might let the companies decide on what this minimum period should be,” said ministry sources.

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Source-Medindia