When an employee adopts a child, the bond formed isn't provisional. The sleepless nights are just as real. The career disruption is identical. And yet, for years, Indian law quietly maintained a distinction — offering adoptive mothers a shorter window of maternity leave than biological ones.
That distinction is now gone.
On 17 March 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment in Hamsaanandini Nanduri vs Union of India. A two-judge bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan struck down Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020 — the provision that had capped maternity leave entitlements differently for adoptive mothers.
What Section 60(4) Actually Did
The Code on Social Security, 2020 consolidated several older labour laws into a single framework. In theory, this was a modernising move. In practice, Section 60(4) preserved an old inequality: adoptive mothers were entitled to maternity leave, yes, but the duration was shorter than what biological mothers received.
The logic, presumably, was that maternity leave exists partly for physical recovery from childbirth. Adoptive mothers don't go through labour, so a shorter leave was considered adequate.
This reasoning, the Supreme Court found, misses the point entirely.
The Recovery That Nobody Counted
Maternity leave was never only about physical recovery. It exists because a new child — regardless of how that child enters a family — demands an enormous adjustment. Feeding schedules, medical check-ups, the sheer cognitive load of early parenthood. These don't arrive only through childbirth.
For adoptive mothers, there's an added layer. Many adopted children, particularly older ones, carry the weight of institutional care or difficult early circumstances. The bonding process can require more time, not less. The idea that these mothers needed shorter state support was never grounded in evidence — it was a legislative assumption that hardened into policy.
Justices Pardiwala and Mahadevan's bench, by striking down Section 60(4), rejected that assumption on constitutional grounds. The ruling aligns maternity leave entitlements with the lived reality of parenthood rather than its biological mechanics.
Why This Matters Beyond the Courtroom
For working professionals in formal employment, this ruling has immediate practical weight. Adoptive mothers covered under the Code on Social Security can now claim the same leave protections their colleagues receive — without the previous statutory ceiling cutting that entitlement short.
But the significance extends further. India has been slowly, inconsistently, expanding how its labour laws understand family. This judgment is part of that arc. It signals that the law's definition of a mother can no longer stop at biology.
There's also a secondary effect worth watching. Employers who had structured internal policies around the now-struck-down provision will need to review and revise those policies. HR teams and legal departments at larger organisations will be updating their leave frameworks in the months ahead.
The Quiet Inequality That Outlasted Its Time
Labour law tends to lag behind social reality. Families are formed in many ways. Parenthood is more varied now than the statutes written decades ago anticipated. The Code on Social Security was supposed to be a fresh start, but it carried forward an assumption that the Supreme Court has now called out.
The Hamsaanandini Nanduri judgment didn't make a sweeping declaration about the nature of family. It did something more precise: it removed a legal distinction that had no defensible basis, and in doing so, treated adoptive mothers as exactly what they are — mothers.