5 min readSep 15, 2026 04:36 PM IST First published on: Sep 15, 2026 at 04:32 PM ISTBy Thamizhachi ThangapandianOn August 18, Tamil Nadu’s Human Resources Management Minister, D Sarathkumar announced that women government employees would now receive 365 days of maternity leave for the birth of a third child, up from the earlier 12 weeks. The state government called it a step towards women’s empowerment and social welfare, and framed it as a response to the state’s declining fertility rate. On the surface, this is a welcome correction. The Madras High Court had also observed that the physical and caregiving demands of childbirth do not diminish because a woman is having her third child. Twelve weeks was never enough, and removing that arbitrary cap was overdue.AdvertisementYet, I find myself returning to a question this scheme cannot answer, one I suspect it was never meant to ask. Why does the father’s leave never grow longer?Tamil Nadu did not arrive at this question recently. It was Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement that insisted that marriage and motherhood were matters of a woman’s dignity and consent, not obligations owed to custom, or family. It shaped how Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) governments approached women’s welfare — not as a single generous gesture but as sustained, structural change. The Kalaignar government gave daughters equal rights to ancestral property, 16 years before the Union government followed in 2005. Free bus travel widened where a woman could go without needing a man’s permission or her family’s spare change. The Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai placed a monthly sum directly into women’s hands, recognising that independence requires economic control.Historian Linda Gordon has argued that we cannot explain, or correct, women’s oppression by cordoning off reproduction from how work, wages and time are organised for everyone else. Tamil Nadu’s maternity leave scheme does precisely this. By speaking only in the language of welfare and care, it presents the lopsided division of parental responsibility as a natural difference between mothers and fathers.AdvertisementAlso Read | At Jadavpur University, the gerua and the stateSweden offers a useful lesson here. In 1974, it became the first country to replace maternity leave with a gender-neutral parental leave benefit, allowing parents to divide it between them. However, fathers’ participation remained low for decades because leave could simply be transferred to mothers. Sweden eventually introduced non-transferable leave reserved for each parent. The lesson is not that fathers should be given leave, but that policy has to be designed in a way that makes caregiving a shared responsibility.We have not even begun this conversation. We do not have a national paternity leave policy worth the name, let alone one built on the understanding that raising a child is not a woman’s assignment with occasional male assistance.This brings me to the second, more uncomfortable part of the government’s own justification: That this measure responds to a declining fertility rate. But extending maternity leave does not address why fertility is declining in the first place. Across the world, women are choosing to have fewer children because the economic and social cost of raising a child has become harder to justify. If we are serious about reversing declining birth rates, the answer is paid, mandatory, non-transferable leave for fathers.I am reminded of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and how carefully, in the postwar years, domesticity was repeatedly sold to women as fulfilment rather than constraint. There is a version of that same story being retold today, dressed in the language of welfare and women’s empowerment.you may likeThere is a question this scheme does not ask. A year of paid leave tied to a third pregnancy does not exist in a vacuum. A scheme that pushes women towards childbearing risks placing marginalised women in vulnerable positions while failing to address the larger question of care. A woman’s body, and what she chooses to do with it, is not a lever for the state to pull in service of a fertility target.This scheme, then, is not the full response to declining birth rates and the unequal burden of care it presents itself as. Every woman who benefits from this scheme deserves that time, and more. But if this is the full extent of the state’s response, it tells us something about where Indian society still places responsibility for the next generation, regardless of who is in government. Until that changes, adding more days to maternity leave will not solve the problem it claims to address.The writer is Lok Sabha MP from the DMK, Chennai South