In India, only 27% of women work, and that deficit costs the country up to 2.5 percentage points of gross domestic product per year. Last week, India’s government made an attempt to rectify the problem by doubling its federally-mandated paid maternity leave from three months to six.
The new, extended policy puts most of the rest of the world to absolute shame.
India’s new 26 weeks of paid maternity leave surpasses France’s 16-week leave, and it bests the 14 weeks available in Germany and Japan. It also dwarfs Australia’s 6-week leave and the United States’ policy of giving women no paid leave at all. If India was an OECD country it would rank sixth, alongside Israel and Poland, for longest paid leave. Only the U.K., Greece, Ireland, the Slovak Republic, and the Czech Republic offer new mothers more paid time off.
Despite its generosity, India’s new law has its flaws. It only applies to the nation’s 1.8 million female workers in so-called organized labor. Another 16 million women, who are either self-employed or work from home, exist outside that classification and won’t be covered. There’s also fear that the new policy will disincentivize businesses from hiring women because their potential leave is an additional expense and could be seen as an inconvenience to employers. But a reduction in turnover costs could offset the benefit’s expense if the new policy causes fewer women to leave the workforce to have children.
More broadly, there’s hope that the new policy will make Indian business more accommodating to women. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for one, is convinced of its upside. On social media, he called the bill a “landmark moment in our efforts towards women-led development.”