How workplace creches can change the game for women workers

Making employers provide creche facilities would be a powerful incentive for women to stay on in the workforce rather than drop out owing to the pressure of child care, says Shuma Raha.

In recent weeks, the conversation around maternity and paternity leave has been fervid. The ministry of labour's Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, mooted by Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi, raises compulsory maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks. That this is praiseworthy is a no-brainer. The debate was on why the Bill was silent on paternity leave.

A-ha, so the government feels childcare is a woman's burden alone, bristled the votaries of gender equality. (In fact, government grants 15 days' paternity leave to its own employees.) Others pointed out that six months' maternity leave could actually work against women. For companies, it ups the cost of hiring women vis-a-vis men, whereas, a corresponding paternity leave would have put them on a par. And then, Gandhi stirred up the controversy some more by declaring that if they did get it, men would simply treat paternity leave as a holiday, letting their wives do the heavy lifting of baby care.

In the din over the big-ticket maternity leave announcement -- and outrage that it hasn't facilitated diaper duty for dads -- one crucial provision of the Bill has gone largely undiscussed. The amendment also requires every organisation with 50 or more employees to "provide creche facilities within a prescribed distance". The woman will be allowed four visits to the creche in a day, it adds.

For a woman desperately trying to finesse the demands of a job with the demands of motherhood, this is as critical as the maternity leave largesse. Especially, if she belongs to a nuclear family set-up. After six months, she may be less hollow-eyed with sleeplessness and more adjusted to the enormous workload her bundle of joy has turned out to be. But there's no way she can head back to office with peace of mind unless she has proper day care for her child.

Sumedha Dutta, associate partner at HSA Advocates in Delhi, considers herself lucky. When she returned to work three months after her baby girl was born in June 2015, the management fixed up a room where the child could stay with her nanny. "I was the first woman in their employ to have a baby," says Dutta. "The space they provided wasn't a creche, of course, but thanks to it I was able to join work and continue to nurse my baby."

Dutta knows that the makeshift creche her office organised for her was much more than what a lot of new mothers get at work. Of course, many multinationals and IT firms with progressive gender-sensitive policies already have proper creches at their offices and campuses. EY, Accenture, Wipro, Cummins, Bharti Airtel, GE, Infosys, Mindtree and HCL Technologies are among those that provide the facility on or off site. But the majority, especially small and medium-sized companies, do not.

According to the 2011 census, India's female labour force participation rate is 25.51 per cent, which is pretty abysmal when you consider that even Bangladesh's FLFP rate is nearly 58 per cent. Making employers provide creche facilities would be a powerful incentive for women to stay on in the workforce rather than drop out owing to the pressure of child care.

But the lack of discourse around this critical provision of the Bill makes one fearful. Will the government enforce the rule with an iron hand? Or will it be left largely to the good intentions of organisations, the way "mandatory" sexual harassment complaints cells have been?

Face it, most workplaces take a dim view of women's right to a work-life balance. And the process often begins right from the interview stage when employers try to suss out their marriage or baby plans.

Let organisations not be allowed to deliver on six months' maternity leave, but default on the provision for creches. You need both to make workplaces truly gender friendly.