Paternity leaves in India: Let’s start the discussion
In the year 2000, I went to Germany to pursue my PhD, I met a colleague (Pursuing his PhD) who was on a paternity leave and occasionally came to visit the group. His wife was a student and had to go back to complete her degree course with in few weeks after delivery of the child. My colleague utilized the policy of paternity leave and thus brought a balance between career of his wife and parenting responsibilities. It is been 15 years since then, I have gone through my own challenges of child and a career, having lived in European countries in initial years of our parenting tenure, my husband could pitch in as a father, a lot more than average men in India. This was possible due to parent friendly policies of European government and social conditioning where new parents are given a leeway to work from home at times.
In India, with changing structures of families from joint to nuclear, no mandate on having a day care within the organizations or companies, rising expenses of private day cares and insecure and unreliable nannies are raising questions on diverse solutions to the situation where new parents (mostly mothers) are compelled to get stuck in their careers to rear children. There are few who leave their career willingly but most of them leave their career because there is no descent place (Read clean, hygienic, accessible, and reasonably priced) to leave the child behind.
Paternity Leave: Can this disrupt the mammoth of child care?
Indian government has allocation of 15 days of paternity leave for government employees and that is during the delivery or adoption of the child. In private sectors of India there is no such mandate and often personal leaves are used by willing fathers to take care of a child if required. Mothers are allowed to get 3-6 months of paid maternity leave depending on the type of sector she is working with. This too is less considering the long period of parenting, but even if this could be divided between men and women or made optional to both parents, will let women go back to work in urgent work or high demanding jobs. Around the world Scandinavian countries are doing best when it comes to gender equal policies on parenting and other responsibilities. Countries like Sweden are churning out analytics to understand why mostly women are working only half time as compared to men and pushing the envelope of paternity leaves to provide more options to women to stay at work for longer time of the day. Analysis are already pouring in with positive results showing that women of these countries are benefited directly and so are the families becoming more equal, more balanced and happier.
Indian fathers: Are they ready for paternity leave?
In India, most fathers remain away from the process of child birth and child care. They put the blame on age old tradition where women mostly go to their parent’s house for delivery. In patriarchal India this is a comfortable idea to pass the responsibility to girl and her family for the child birth. I don’t see any reason why Indian men working in multinational engineering (read IT) firms need to follow this age old tradition still today. Also why working women need to follow the same as most of the time they need to take extra leave in order to travel to the parents place? Men are kept in a cushioned situation in India where most of their duties are considered to be fulfilled if they earn enough money for the family. Most of them don’t believe in work-life balance or help the wife in household chores and parent care, but believe strongly work trips, late evening work schedule, making jokes of any male colleague who want to give more time to the family. They lose on the attractive milestones of growing child and lose on making a robust relationship with their kids. They feel alienated in the mother-child domain most of the time.
Paternity leave can bring fathers close to their children’s initial care and help providing a balanced childhood to them.
Social and government policies in India needs urgent revisions as a lot of resource is invested in a woman’s education and development, losing her out from the workplace is not helping the country at all. Also it is time that we include fathers as an equal partner in parenting and not just a money provider to the child’s expenses.
It needs a village to raise a child, so let’s start that by including the father in that village first.
Sources - Central Government Staff News, BabyCenter.com, Guardian, Economist, Economic Times
