In a country where the extended family is fast becoming a museum piece, and nuclear households are the norm, one would expect some semblance of policy catching up with reality. Alas, India, in all its cultural grandeur and bureaucratic slumber, still treats paternity leave as a novelty—if not an outright joke. While the world moves forward to support equal parenting in tight-knit modern families, India appears more animated arguing whether Hindi should dominate the South, or if Tamil is the oldest language on earth.
We’ve all seen it. Young couples, newly minted parents, managing a colicky infant, sleep deprivation, work calls, and pressure to “bounce back” in style. The mother bears the brunt of it all, naturally, but the father? He’s often seen fumbling about, expected to be stoic and efficient, returning to work after a perfunctory hospital photo op and some laddoos. In corporate India, three days is common. Fifteen days in the central government is considered generous. Three months? That’s Scandinavian sorcery.
But this isn’t about coddling men. It’s about basic family support in the absence of the joint family safety net. The good old grandmother-aunt-army has dwindled. Today’s urban couple is mostly on their own. In such a context, expecting the mother to handle postpartum recovery, breastfeeding, baby blues, and housework with no institutional support for the father is not just foolish—it’s cruel.
A meaningful paternity leave isn’t a luxury. It’s the difference between a family surviving and a family thriving. It allows the father to bond with his child from day one, to become more than a spectator in his own family. It gives the mother breathing room—not just physically, but emotionally. And it sets the tone for shared responsibility that can last a lifetime.
Yet, policy remains indifferent. One would think this is a simple, humane step forward. But our leaders are otherwise occupied—fighting over what script should be used on milestone boards, what language a civil servant should write an exam in, or which region has linguistic superiority. Parliament spends more time arguing over whether Hindi should be compulsory in schools than it does discussing parental leave policies.
It is perhaps our greatest contradiction—boasting of “strong family values” while offering little state support to families actually trying to function. We invoke “Bharatiya sanskriti” at the drop of a hat, yet recoil from reform that would make parenting less isolating. We romanticise the joint family, but do nothing to help the millions who no longer live in one.
Of course, the patriarchy lurking underneath helps. If a man asks for leave, he’s looked at as either weak or holidaying. Many men themselves feel ashamed to take time off—trained to believe that their worth lies only in the office, not the nursery. Corporates, conveniently complicit, will cry about “costs” but happily fund pointless team-building offsites.
Let’s stop pretending this is radical. Countries poorer than us, less loud about “values” than us, have managed it. India’s economic aspirations will remain hollow if its families are left to fend for themselves without even the basic dignity of co-parenting time. We need not emulate Sweden overnight, but surely we can do better than three days.
If the political class can take month-long leaves to canvass in elections, surely the common man deserves a few weeks to change nappies and warm bottles. And if the idea of three months of paternity leave seems outlandish to some, one might politely ask: is that because it’s unaffordable, or simply because it’s not written in Hindi?
We must choose—does it want to be a country perpetually arguing over tongues and scripts, or one that actually speaks the language of care, support and modernity? The nursery is waiting.
