The story so far: Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that adoptive mothers could avail themselves of 12 weeks of paid maternity leave regardless of the age of their children at the time of adoption. Striking down Section 60(4) of the Social Security Code, 2020 (previously Section 5(4) of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961), which limited this benefit only to mothers who adopted children under the age of three months, the Court said that an adoptive mother had the same rights and obligations towards the child as a biological mother.
Statutory maternity benefits for working women in India began to be granted in colonial times. The Bombay Maternity Benefit Act, 1929, covered women factory workers. It was followed by similar laws in other parts of the country in the run-up to Independence. In 1961, Parliament passed the Maternity Benefit Act to provide paid maternity leave of 12 weeks to working women across the country.
