This is not simply a social pattern that families fall into by habit. It is an arrangement that policy has built and continues to reinforce. The Time Use Survey 2024 documented what most households already know intuitively: 41% of women aged 15 to 59 participated in household caregiving, compared with 21.4% of men, and women spent nearly twice as many hours on such tasks. When caregiving is this asymmetric, the consequences reach well beyond the home. 

India's total fertility rate has dropped to 2.0, and in urban areas to 1.6, below replacement level (as per NFHS-5). Only 23% of currently married women say they want another child. These are not coincidences. They are rational responses by women who bear the full cost of having one.

Supreme Court Ruling

The Supreme Court, in its 2026 ruling in Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India, said as much. The case concerned maternity leave for adoptive mothers, and the bench struck down a provision that denied leave to mothers of children adopted after three months of age. But within a hundred-page judgment, the Court laid out something broader.

Justice Pardiwala observed that there exists "a kind of injustice, although not deliberate, yet based on assumptions so deeply rooted that they have ceased to appear as injustice at all." The bench identified two specific harms from the absence of paternity leave: it entrenches gendered caregiving roles, and it deprives fathers of any meaningful chance to be present in their child's earliest weeks. Crucially, the Court directed Parliament to legislate paternity leave as a social security entitlement, not as a matter of employer discretion. That framing is not incidental. A benefit left to employer goodwill can be withdrawn, varied, or simply never offered. A statutory social security provision carries the force of law and the obligation of universality.

Legal Framework 

The current legal framework falls far short of that standard. Under the Central Civil Services (Leave) Rules, 1972, male central government employees are entitled to 15 days of paternity leave. Their female counterparts receive 180 days of maternity leave. In the private sector, there is no statutory paternity leave. Whether a father can take any leave at all depends entirely on what his employer chooses to offer, which in practice means it is generous at large corporates competing for talent and non-existent across most of the economy. The existing policy, such as it is, leaves the overwhelming majority of fathers entirely outside its scope. The most substantive legislative attempt to change this is the Paternity and Parental Benefit Bill, 2025, introduced in the Lok Sabha by MP Supriya Sule, which proposes eight weeks of paid paternity leave alongside eight weeks of shared parental leave, which couples can divide within 18 months of the birth. It is a private member's bill that has not yet been taken up for discussion.

At the state level, the picture is uneven, though not very encouraging. Sikkim grants 30 days to male government employees. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu mirror the central norm of 15 days. Kerala provides 10. Andhra Pradesh plans to introduce a 60-day benefit for the third child, framed as a population-growth incentive. None of these provisions extends to private sector workers. None comes close to what the evidence suggests is needed to change household behaviour in any meaningful way. A patchwork of state-level rules for government servants is not a paternity leave policy. It is the absence of one.

Global Experience 

The international experience makes this gap harder to defend with every passing year. A 2022 World Bank study tracking 190 countries across five decades found a consistent negative relationship between the leave gap separating mothers and fathers and women's workforce participation, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in South Asia. 

What countries are actually doing tells the same story. Spanish fathers are entitled to 16 weeks of fully paid leave. Sweden (the first country to replace gender-specific maternity leave with parental leave in 1974) gives each parent 240 days of leave. Iceland goes further, giving both parents 12 months of leave - each parent is entitled to 6 months, of which 6 weeks are transferable to the other.  The same shift is visible elsewhere. Japan provides fathers access to up to a year of leave with wage replacement. Singapore has government-paid paternity leave for 4 weeks. Australia provides 20 weeks of government-funded parental leave pay. Across the Americas, the picture is uneven but moving in the same direction: Canada provides dedicated “daddy weeks” under its parental insurance system, while Brazil has expanded paternity leave, recently increasing it from 5 days to 20 as a formal social security benefit. Even Pakistan’s Maternity and Paternity Leave Act, 2023, provides federal employees with 30 days of fully paid leave. 

Need For Action

Parliament needs to act, and the framework is not complicated. A national paternity leave law must be statutory to apply to both the formal and informal sectors. It must be paid at an adequate wage-replacement rate, because unpaid leave is not available to workers who cannot afford to forgo income. And a defined portion must be non-transferable, reserved for fathers alone, because transferable leave defaults to mothers, leaving the structural imbalance intact. 

The Paternity and Parental Benefit Bill, 2025, is a credible starting point. What it needs is parliamentary time, government backing, and the inclusion of a non-transferable father's quota as a core feature. The Supreme Court has said the current arrangement is constitutionally unjust. The fertility data have shown that women are already making rational decisions in response to the costs they are forced to carry alone. Economic evidence from around the world shows what happens when countries close the leave gap and what continues to happen when they do not. Fifteen days for government workers, nothing for everyone else, is not a policy that a serious economy can afford to defend.

(The writer is a Faculty Member in Flame University, Pune. Views expressed are personal.)