In a ruling on maternity leave for adoptive and surrogate mothers last week, the Supreme Court called on the Union government to examine the need for a formal law recognising paternity leave for all fathers, adoptive or biological.It noted that though parenthood is not a solitary function, fathers are often relegated to the periphery of their children’s lives, especially in infancy and early childhood, terming this “a kind of injustice”. Should men be given paternity leave? Ashwini Deshpande and Sanjoy Ghose discuss this in a conversation moderated by Priscilla Jebaraj. Edited excerpts: Why does paternity leave matter at all and who would it benefit? And who suffers from the absence of fathers in their children’s daily lives — when the Supreme Court speaks of this as an injustice, who is the victim?Sanjoy Ghose: On a personal note, when it came to being up at night, my daughter’s mother said that I have had her inside me for nine months and now for nine months it is your duty to take care of her! But more importantly, I think the judgment in the Hamsaanandini Nanduri case sees it not only from the viewpoint of the mother or the father, but most importantly, the child. It said that during the impressionable formative years, the child must have access to both parents as caregivers. The whole concept of the gendered roles that the child inculcates, that a mother’s duty is to take care, father’s duty is to work at the workplace, all this stems from the fact that we as a society do not have paternity leave, we do not have equal sharing of the parental burden or responsibility. It needs to be viewed from the rights of the child, and of the mother to also have her burdens shared so that they are not unevenly distributed.Ashwini Deshpande: The fact is that in terms of both childcare and the wider responsibilities within the household, both men and women should be equally involved, just as there should be equal participation outside the home. Unfortunately, in India, the time-use survey data shows that women spend 10 times as many hours on domestic work, which includes childcare and elderly care, compared to men. Particularly when it comes to childcare, it almost exclusively becomes a responsibility of the mother, which prevents her from accessing work opportunities outside the home. Which means that when you see gender inequality in the labour market, the flip side of that is the gender inequality in caregiving roles.So it’s absolutely important for the child to have both the mother and the father in a hands-on way present, providing care and nurturing. But the norm in India is that somehow it’s the woman’s role — if not the mother directly, it’s the grandmother or aunt or elder sister. That needs to change. While there is no paternity leave law, there is a mandate for maternity leave. How well is that implemented?Ashwini Deshpande: Only 10% of India’s workforce works in the formal sector so 90% is informal, for whom this is not applicable. Even in the formal sector, most establishments are so small that they cannot afford either paternity nor maternity leave. In establishments that are mandated to provide maternity leave, they must also offer paternity leave, along with a strong signalling of the expectation that fathers and mothers both need to contribute.Beyond the provision of maternity leave, though, there is often discrimination, so either women are hired in fewer numbers or are kind of nudged to leave, or they are bypassed for promotions or relegated to lower-level decision making. So there’s a lot of internal unfair practices towards women just because they’ve taken maternity leave. So I think it’s a complicated set of factors that ends up discriminating against women, either at the point of entry, which is just not hiring enough women, or at the point of promotion, or in terms of workplace culture where women are kind of made to feel guilty that they took maternity leave.So it’s a double whammy. You don’t get help at home and at your workplace you are discriminated against. And there is a motherhood penalty in wages. After the birth of the first child, the wage gap between couples increases, even in Scandinavian countries. The wage of the mother drops and the wage of the father either stays the same or increases.Sanjoy Ghose: We have a plethora of laws, legislation, protections, which govern only this minuscule, highly regulated part of the economy, though many of the most vulnerable women who need this protection are in the informal sector. Women already have baggage. For example, we’ve had such progress on the law against sexual harassment. But if a woman raises a genuine complaint in the workforce, she’s singled out as litigious, as someone who should be avoided. When it comes to maternity benefits, the Act also provides non-termination during the period of maternity leave. But employers and employees know that the discrimination can be very subtle when you want to get around that. If promotions are delayed or denied, it is very difficult for a lady to prove that this is directly related to her having had a child and having motherhood duties. The vast majority of Indian workplaces, even corporate workplaces, don’t offer paternity leave at all. But the central government offers two weeks to its employees who become fathers, which can be taken any time from 15 days before birth until six months afterwards. A private member’s bill introduced in parliament last year proposes eight weeks of paternity leave. Some multinational companies in India offer up to three months, which can be taken any time in the first year, so some fathers take the leave after six months when their wives go back to work. The gold standard is Sweden, which offers 480 days of paid leave per child to be shared between parents, with 90 days each of non-transferable leave, and fathers currently average about 30% of this parental leave, which is ultimately paid for by taxpayers. Given this spectrum of policy options, what would be most viable and useful in Indian workplaces? Let’s say we stick only to the formal sector to start with.Ashwini Deshpande: 480 days in India won’t work, but I think the principle underlying the Sweden model is correct. It should be called parental leave, not maternity or paternity. Let the couple sort it out, give them some flexibility, but some part of it should be non-transferable so that it’s compulsory for the man also to take some leave. But I think it has to be accompanied by a lot of conversation about the norms shifting, that both parents are responsible. It’s their child they are raising together and fathers and mothers need to be equally involved. That messaging has to be strong and clear, from public platforms. How many days is optimal? Well, I don’t see it going beyond the six months already being given for women. So call that same six months parental leave and insist that both parents must use it.Sanjoy Ghose: But in that model, we are assuming that the wife is also working and therefore, there is a question of sharing of the responsibility. But in many cases, if the mother is a homemaker, it will be the father who is entitled to the full six months of parental leave. My fear is that the husband will be sitting there and it’s the poor wife who will be now not only taking care of the kid, but also feeding a husband who is sitting and enjoying themselves. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and it should not be that a law made with these good intentions lands up the poor woman to now 24-7 cater to the husband who’s having fun with a paid six months leave from office. But of course, this kind of leave will only be taken in sedentary jobs, like government service where promotions are a matter of norm. It will not happen in an asset management company or in an accounting company or in a law firm, because it’s so competitive. No person in their right mind wants to take six months leave and be out of the rat race. So there are so many factors which have to be worked out. I think it is very impractical to come with a general prescription of what should be paternity leave and how it should be administered. But we do have such a general prescription for maternity leave, don’t we? However well or badly it’s implemented, it is there as a right.Sanjoy Ghose: Unfortunately, you have to understand it in the context of patriarchy. Maternity leave is seen as a much more genuine leave, though I’m not saying that there are no caregiving fathers. But given that we are still to evolve to that level of gender justice and patriarchy is still so rampant, you cannot blindly equate between paternity leave and maternity leave.Ashwini Deshpande: Even in academia, in American universities, which are on a tenure track, both men and women can apply for one year’s extension in the tenure clock if you had a child during that time. But research shows that young male assistant professors who get that extension end up actually publishing another paper, whereas the mothers, the female assistant professors, actually struggle with both the job and the child. So it is a very realistic scenario where somebody will just sit at home for six months and will order the wife to make tea in addition to taking care of the child. So it’s not an easy solution, but I think the notion that it should be parental leave, not maternity, should be the starting point. And then you work out how it should be implemented to minimise discrimination against women and to minimise misuse of that facility for just taking leave and not actually helping out.Sanjoy Ghose: Yes, where both are working, this can be easily worked out because then one spouse can avail the leave only during the time when the other spouse gives a certificate that she’s actually attending work, so that will be some kind of check on this misuse.Ashwini Deshpande: If you call it parental leave, that signals something. And then you work out the nuts and bolts issues, which will be complex. Moving beyond the formal sector, what would it take to bring this kind of parental leave to all of working India at some point in the future?Sanjoy Ghose: The stated objective of the labour codes of 2020, which came into effect last November, is to bring more people into the formal economy, so that they can benefit from such policies. For that, there has to be an element of flexibility, there has to be minimising of legal processes. So it is a long haul issue.But also, there is a patriarchal mindset which has to go. During a Supreme Court hearing on menstrual leave, there was an observation made that it might affect the career of women if they insist on menstrual leave. Similarly, with the sexual harassment law, it was said this will discourage employing women. That attitude has to change that this will make women an unattractive human resource in the job market. This is absolute nonsense. This bogeyman argument cannot be allowed to hold labour rights hostage. It’s a long fight ahead of us.Ashwini Deshpande: We need some reality checks here. 90% of India’s workers work in enterprises that employ between one and 10 workers, maybe just one person. Factories with more than 300 workers are 0.5% of total enterprises, so we are talking about an industrial structure where the average number of employees per firm is very small. If you think of a nano firm with three people, and if one of them is on parental leave, you have to also think of how that enterprise is going to function. So I think increasing the size of enterprises is an absolute precondition for parental, caregiving, menstrual, any other kind of leave. Or think about a gig worker. Supposing they’ve signed up with a platform and then the woman is going to have a child. Can she continue to work? No. So she just drops out of the labour force. So I think that’s the reality of the Indian labour market. Firms that can afford it, that have a critical mass of workers, should certainly be having these policies. But I think we live in a world of segmented labour markets and this dualism is going to characterise our industrial structure and labour force for a while to come.Listen to the conversationProfessor Ashwini Deshpande, who heads the Economics Department at Ashoka University, specialises in development economics, including gender and labour issues. Sanjoy Ghose is a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India with extensive experience in labour law.Published - March 27, 2026 01:31 am IST