The Maternity Benefit Act of India gives working women up to 26 weeks of fully paid maternity leave. That makes India’s law more generous than many developed countries. On paper, at least.
The 2017 amendment to the original 1961 Act was widely covered as a win for working mothers. And it was – for women in the formal sector, employed in companies with 10 or more people, who had worked at least 80 days in the preceding 12 months.
The problem? That describes a small fraction of India’s female workforce.
IndiaSpend’s analysis of government data put a number on it: 93.5% of working women in India have no access to maternity benefits at all. The law that made headlines in 2017 simply doesn’t reach most of the women who need it.
Maternity Benefit Act India: What Employers Are Actually Required to Do
Before getting to what workplaces do in practice, it’s worth being precise about what the law demands – because many HR teams get parts of this wrong.
Leave entitlement:
- 26 weeks of fully paid leave for mothers with fewer than two children (up to 8 weeks can be taken before the due date)
- 12 weeks for mothers who already have two or more children
- 12 weeks for adoptive mothers (child under 3 months) and commissioning mothers, counted from the day the child is handed over
What else employers must provide:
- Full salary throughout the leave period, based on average daily wages – not a reduced amount, not half-pay
- Crèche facilities for any establishment employing 50 or more workers, with mothers allowed four visits per day
- Two nursing breaks daily until the child turns 15 months, in addition to regular lunch breaks
- A work-from-home option after leave ends, where the job allows it, by mutual agreement
- A medical bonus of ₹1,000 if the employer doesn’t provide free medical care
Section 12 of the Act is unambiguous: terminating or changing the terms of employment for a woman on maternity leave is illegal. Courts have also made clear, repeatedly, that none of these rights can be cancelled through a contract, a probation clause, or by keeping someone on a short-term assignment.
In May 2025, the Supreme Court went further. In K. Umadevi vs. Government of Tamil Nadu, it ruled that having more than two children does not disqualify a woman from maternity leave – it only limits the duration to 12 weeks. The court also reinforced that restricting these rights on any grounds undermines constitutional protections under Articles 14 and 21.
The Compliance Picture Is Not Good
Walk into most mid-size or large Indian companies today and you will find a maternity policy in the employee handbook. Whether it reflects what actually happens is a different question.
Crèche facilities are the clearest failure: The mandate has existed since 2017. Eight years on, a significant share of eligible employers – companies with 50+ staff – still don’t have functional crèche arrangements. The law allows shared facilities, so proximity to a neighbouring employer’s crèche counts. Many companies use this as a reason to delay rather than comply.
Contractual workers are regularly told they don’t qualify: This is legally wrong, but it keeps happening. Women on fixed-term contracts, project-based roles, or probation periods are often told their situation is “different.” Courts have consistently disagreed. But most of these women don’t know their rights well enough to push back, and filing a labour complaint is a slow, intimidating process.
Pregnancy disclosure still carries career risk: A 2024 case involving a Pune IT company became public when an employee was terminated shortly after informing HR she was pregnant. She had more than a year’s tenure. The court ruled against the employer, which had to compensate her and revise its policies. What made this case notable was not how unusual it was – it was how familiar it sounded to employment lawyers.
Workplace surveys consistently find the same pattern: women delay telling their managers about pregnancies for as long as possible. The fear isn’t always termination. It’s subtler – being passed over for a project, a promotion that quietly disappears, a role that changes shape while they’re away.
A report from the British Safety Council India found that 75% of working mothers believed their career had fallen behind by one to two years after maternity leave. Nearly 40% said their pay was affected, or that their employer changed their job role in ways they hadn’t agreed to.
Why the Gap Between Law and Practice Persists
There are a few honest reasons for this.
India puts the entire cost on the employer: Most countries that offer generous maternity leave fund part of it through state social security systems. India doesn’t. Every rupee of a woman’s 26-week salary comes from her employer. For large corporations, this is manageable. For a company running on thin margins with 15 to 30 employees, it’s a genuine financial strain.
Researchers at Banerjee et al. (2022) found evidence of something uncomfortable: in some sectors, the 2017 amendment actually reduced employer demand for women of childbearing age. The law meant to protect working mothers was, in some cases, making it harder for them to get hired at all.
The informal economy is almost entirely unprotected: Over 85% of Indian women work in establishments with fewer than 10 employees – the exact threshold below which the Act doesn’t apply. Add to that the agricultural workers, domestic workers, daily wage labourers, and the expanding gig economy, and you have tens of millions of women for whom this law might as well not exist.
The Social Security Code, 2020, was supposed to fix this. It allows the government to extend benefits to gig and unorganized workers through a dedicated fund. Draft rules from December 2025 propose eligibility after 90-120 days of engagement. But final notifications are still pending.
Enforcement is too weak to change behaviour: Labour inspections are infrequent. When they do happen, the focus is rarely on maternity compliance. Women who face violations often don’t report them – partly out of fear, partly because the grievance process takes months and rarely results in meaningful remedies.
What the Better Employers Are Doing
Companies are getting this right, and the difference shows up clearly in employee experience, retention, and how women at those organizations talk about their workplace.
What they tend to have in common:
- Maternity policy that goes beyond 26 weeks – extended leave for medical complications, premature births, or post-natal recovery
- A structured return-to-work programme: phased schedules for the first few months back, a dedicated point of contact, check-ins at 30, 60, and 90 days
- Paternity leave that’s actually used, not just offered – when men take leave too, it stops being a “women’s issue” and starts being a family policy
- Manager training that covers how to handle pregnancy disclosures, how to redistribute work without penalizing the returning employee, and what not to say
- Regular workplace surveys that ask specific questions about whether women feel safe disclosing pregnancy and whether they return to equivalent roles
That last one matters more than people acknowledge. Organizations that run honest workplace surveys on this topic tend to surface problems early – before they become litigation, attrition, or a story in the press.
This Is Also an Employer Branding Problem
Companies spend significant money on employer branding. Certification, awards, culture initiatives – all of it aimed at attracting and retaining talent.
And yet maternity compliance, or the lack of it, travels fast. Women talk to each other. Before accepting a role, many now ask specifically about what happened to the last few women who took maternity leave. They check forums. They ask connections inside the company.
Leadership in workplaces that treat maternity as a business continuity problem – something to manage and minimize – tends to lose women in their 30s at a rate that no hiring campaign can fix. Those are often the same women who would have moved into senior roles within five years.
The female labour force participation rate in India rose from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. That’s real progress. But around 30% of new mothers still exit the workforce within a year of childbirth, citing inflexible work conditions as the reason. That number won’t move unless the experience of returning to work actually changes.
Where Things Stand Right Now
The law is not the problem. The Maternity Benefit Act of India is clear, enforceable, and has strong judicial backing.
The problem is the gap between what a policy document says and what a woman’s manager does when she comes back from six months away. The problem is crèche facilities that exist only in HR compliance reports. The problem is a job title that changed while she was gone, or a project list that mysteriously shrank.
Fixing this doesn’t require new legislation. It requires employers who take the law seriously as a floor, not a ceiling – and leadership that understands the connection between how they treat new mothers and the kind of workplace they’re actually building.
