Maternity, Paternity and Child Care Leave

180-day maternity, 15-day paternity, 730-day Child Care Leave with 80% pay after the first year, surrogacy amendments — what the rules say, what employers can and cannot do, and the application templates to use.

Maternity Leave (180 days), Paternity Leave (15 days) and Child Care Leave (730 days over a career, with 80 percent pay after the first 365 days) are the three family-care leave categories that get refused, deferred or partially sanctioned more often than any other. The CCS (Leave) Rules and DoPT Office Memoranda set out the entitlement clearly, but the discretion granted to the sanctioning authority means that practical outcomes vary widely across departments.

This section covers what an employee can actually do: the timeline for filing a Maternity Leave application, the obligations that fall on the employer once the leave is granted, the right to return to the same post on the same terms, the ready-to-use formats for Paternity and CCL with sample justifications that have been sanctioned, the recent Delhi and Karnataka High Court rulings that have struck down arbitrary refusals, and the 2024 surrogacy amendment that extended these benefits to commissioning mothers and fathers.

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