Rights of Adoptive Mothers Under Indian Law.

INTRODUCTION:-

The right to found a family is not confined to those who can biologically conceive. In  Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India, (2014) 4 SCC 1 (India)  recognised the right to adopt as flowing from the values underlying Article 21 of the Constitution, even absent a uniform civil code. Yet recognising the right to adopt is only the first step; the harder question is whether the law, once a child is adopted, treats the adoptive mother as a mother in every legal sense.

For years, Indian statutes answered this question inconsistently. The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, as amended in 2017, extended twelve weeks of leave to adoptive mothers of children below three months — a threshold that excluded most adoptions, since children placed through CARA are frequently older. This article examines how this inconsistency was challenged and partially resolved through the Supreme Court’s 2026 decision striking down an analogous restriction under Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020.

This article argues that constitutional equality demands that adoptive motherhood be treated as legally coextensive with biological motherhood across all statutory contexts, not merely those addressed by recent litigation. It proceeds by mapping the constitutional foundation, the statutory framework, and the case law, before assessing what legislative gaps remain.

1. Legal Framework

The legal architecture governing adoptive motherhood in India is built across three distinct layers: personal law governing the act of adoption, labour legislation governing workplace benefits, and constitutional provisions that inform how both are interpreted.

The Right to Adopt

Adoption in India is not governed by a uniform civil law. Hindus adopt under the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956, which confers upon an adopted child rights equivalent to those of a biological child, including rights of maintenance and succession.¹ Persons of other faiths, and increasingly all prospective parents regardless of religion, adopted under the secular framework of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, which vests the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) with regulatory oversight of the adoption process, including eligibility criteria, home study reports, and the legal finalisation of adoption through the competent court.² Neither statute distinguishes, for purposes of legal parentage, between an adoptive mother and a biological mother once the adoption is finalised: the adoptive mother acquires full parental status.

Workplace Maternity Protections

The difficulty arises not at the point of adoption but at the point of employment law recognition of the adoptive mother’s caregiving role. The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, as amended by the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, extended twelve weeks of paid maternity leave to a woman who legally adopts a child below the age of three months. This threshold was carried forward into Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020, which similarly restricted maternity benefits to mothers adopting children below three months of age. Since CARA-regulated adoptions frequently involve children older than three months — the average time taken for legal finalisation alone often exceeds this window — the statutory threshold excluded a substantial proportion of adoptive mothers from the very benefit the amendment was intended to extend to them.

Constitutional Provisions

Three constitutional provisions bear directly on this framework. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law and prohibits arbitrary classification unsupported by an intelligible differential rationally connected to the statute’s object. Article 21, as interpreted in Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India, extends to the right to adopt and, by implication, to the exercise of reproductive and decisional autonomy through means other than biological childbirth. Article 15(3) permits the State to make special provision for women, providing the constitutional basis for protective labour legislation such as the Maternity Benefit Act itself. Read together, these provisions establish that any statutory distinction between adoptive and biological mothers must satisfy the standard of reasonable classification; it was precisely this standard that the age-based threshold in Section 60(4) failed to meet.

Case Law Analysis

The judicial trajectory on adoptive motherhood in India did not begin with a legislative mandate; it developed incrementally through writ petitions filed by individual women against employers who refused to recognise adoption, and later surrogacy, as equivalent to biological childbirth for purposes of leave entitlement.

The Foundational Cases: 

The earliest judicial intervention came in K. Kalaiselvi v. Chennai Port Trust, 2013 SCC .where the Madras High Court considered whether a woman who obtained a child through surrogacy could claim maternity leave under Rule 3-A of the Chennai Port Trust (Leave) Regulations, 1987. The Court held that she could, reasoning that the object of maternity leave — to allow a mother to bond with and care for her child — was not confined to women who had physically given birth. Although the case concerned surrogacy rather than adoption, the Court’s reasoning proceeded by analogy to adoptive mothers, whom it treated as already entitled to equivalent protection. The Kerala High Court reached a similar conclusion in P. Geetha v. Kerala Livestock Development Board Ltd., 2015 SCC where extending maternity leave to a commissioning mother notwithstanding the absence of an explicit statutory provision. Both decisions relied heavily on international instruments, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Beijing Declaration, to hold that the welfare of the child, not the biological process by which motherhood was acquired, ought to determine entitlement to leave.

Rama Pandey v. Union of India 2015 SCC

The Delhi High Court’s judgment in Rama Pandey v. Union of India 2015 SCC    is the pivotal decision extending this reasoning explicitly to adoptive mothers. The petitioner, a commissioning mother through surrogacy, was denied maternity leave on the ground that the applicable rules did not contemplate surrogacy. In allowing the petition, Justice Rajiv Shakdher observed that “even in the case of adoption, the adoptive mother does not give birth to the child, but yet the necessity of bonding of the mother with the adoptive child has been recognised by the Central Government.” The Court held that a commissioning mother is “similarly circumstanced” to an adoptive mother, and that denying her leave, while granting it to adoptive mothers, would itself be an arbitrary and unsustainable distinction. Crucially, the judgment reasoned that apart from the physiological process of childbirth, all other challenges of child-rearing — bonding, adjustment, and care — are common to biological, adoptive, and commissioning mothers alike. This reasoning would later be extracted and relied upon directly by the Supreme Court.

3. Subsequent High Court Decisions

The reasoning in Rama Pandey was followed and extended across multiple High Courts. In “Pratiba Himral v. State of H.P 2021 SCC  the Himachal Pradesh High Court granted maternity leave to a mother who had adopted a child, applying the CCS (Leave) Rules purposively.¹¹ In Chanda Keswani v. State of Rajasthan, 2023 SCC the Rajasthan High Court held that the right to life under Article 21 includes the right to motherhood and the right of every child to full development, and that denial of maternity leave could not turn on whether the child was born biologically, through surrogacy, or through adoption. In Sadhna Agrawal v. State of Chhattisgarh, the Chhattisgarh High Court similarly recognised the right to motherhood and the child’s right to development as facets of Article 21, extending protection regardless of the mode of family formation. By the early 2020s, a consistent line of High Court authority had emerged, even though no central legislation had yet codified this position uniformly.

Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India 2026

The doctrinal culmination of this line of cases arrived in Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India, decided by the Supreme Court on 17 March 2026.The petitioner, an adoptive mother, challenged Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020, which restricted maternity benefit to women adopting children below three months of age. The petitioner argued that this threshold created an unreasonable classification among adoptive mothers themselves, violating Article 14: a woman adopting a four-month-old child would be denied a benefit available to one adopting a two-month-old child, despite both facing materially identical caregiving demands. The bench of Justices Pardiwala and Mahadevan agreed, declaring aSection 60(4) unconstitutional. The Court expressly invoked Rama Pandey, endorsing its observation that, apart from physiological differences, the challenges of rearing a child are common to all mothers. The Court further grounded its reasoning in Article 45, which places an obligation on the State to ensure early childhood care, reasoning that this obligation could not sensibly turn on the age of the child at the time of adoption. Significantly, the Court held that reproductive autonomy under Article 21 is not confined to the biological act of giving birth, but extends to adoption as a constitutionally valid avenue to parenthood.

Read together, this line of authority demonstrates a clear judicial trend: from tentative analogical reasoning in Kalaiselvi, through the explicit equation of adoptive and biological motherhood in Rama Pandey, to the Supreme Court’s 2026 invalidation of a statutory age-based restriction. Yet, as the next section argues, this trend has developed entirely through litigation, leaving the statutory framework itself incomplete.

Critical Evaluation

The judicial trend traced above is undeniably progressive, but it exposes a deeper structural problem: Indian law’s protection of adoptive mothers has developed almost entirely through reactive litigation rather than proactive legislative design. This section identifies three specific inadequacies that persist even after Hamsaanandini Nanduri.

Litigation-Driven Rights Are Inherently Incomplete

Each advance in this area — Kalaiselvi, Rama Pandey, Pratiba Himral, Chanda Keswani, and finally Hamsaanandini Nanduri — required an individual woman to litigate, often for years, against her own employer. The Supreme Court’s 2026 ruling struck down only Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020; it did not, and as a matter of constitutional adjudication could not, rewrite the private-sector Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 to remove the equivalent three-month threshold contained in its 2017 amendment.¹⁸ Consequently, an adoptive mother employed in the private sector adopting a child older than three months remains, on a literal reading of the unamended statute, outside the scope of paid maternity leave, notwithstanding the constitutional reasoning that would plainly apply to her position. This is the central weakness of rights secured through litigation: they attach to the specific provision challenged, not to the underlying legal principle, leaving parallel statutory gaps untouched until someone else brings a fresh petition.

The Adoption Process Itself Works Against the Statutory Threshold

The three-month threshold is not merely arbitrary in principle; it is arithmetically almost impossible to satisfy in practice. Under the Adoption Regulations, 2022 framed by CARA, the process from referral to legal finalisation before a competent court routinely extends beyond ninety days once home study verification, matching, and pre-adoption foster care are accounted for. A statutory benefit conditioned on a child’s age at adoption, when the adoption process itself structurally exceeds that age threshold in the ordinary course, is not merely under-inclusive — it is close to illusory for the class of persons it purports to protect. The Supreme Court’s reasoning in Hamsaanandini Nanduri implicitly recognised this mismatch between administrative reality and statutory design, but a judicial declaration of unconstitutionality addresses only the provision struck down, not the systemic timeline problem that produced the litigation in the first place.

Fragmentation Across Statutes Undermines Predictability

A woman seeking to understand her rights as an adoptive mother in India must currently consult at least four distinct sources: the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956 or the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 for the adoption itself; the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 or the Code on Social Security, 2020 depending on her sector of employment; the relevant service rules if she is a government employee, as in Rama Pandey; and the accumulated case law interpreting each of these instruments. This fragmentation is not a minor drafting inconvenience. It produces genuine unpredictability: an adoptive mother’s entitlement to leave may depend on whether she is a Central Government employee, a private-sector employee, or a state government employee, each governed by a different instrument with different thresholds, none of which have been harmonised despite the constitutional reasoning in Hamsaanandini Nanduri applying with equal force to all three.

A Counterargument Considered

It might be argued that judicial correction, applied incrementally, is preferable to legislative overreach, since courts can tailor relief to the specific facts before them without the risk of overbroad drafting. This argument has some force, but it understates the cost to adoptive mothers who lack the resources or inclination to litigate. Not every woman denied maternity benefit under an unamended statute has the means to pursue a writ petition to the Supreme Court, as the petitioner in Hamsaanandini Nanduri did. A right that depends on litigation for its vindication is, for most people, no right at all. The more persuasive position is that judicial pronouncements of this kind should trigger prompt legislative harmonisation — precisely the step that has not yet occurred.

Comparative Perspectives

Other common law jurisdictions offer a useful contrast. The United Kingdom’s Employment Rights Act 1996, as amended, extends statutory adoption leave and pay on materially the same terms as maternity leave, without an age-of-child threshold analogous to India’s three-month cut-off; entitlement instead turns on the timing of the child’s placement for adoption, not the child’s age at placement.Canada similarly extends parental leave under provincial employment standards legislation to adoptive parents on equal terms with biological parents, again without an age-based exclusion. These frameworks suggest that an age-based threshold is not a necessary feature of adoption-leave legislation; it is a specifically Indian drafting choice that both the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 and the Code on Social Security, 2020 happened to adopt, and which the Supreme Court has now found constitutionally untenable in at least one of its two statutory homes.

Conclusion

This article has traced the evolution of adoptive mothers’ rights in India from tentative analogical reasoning in K. Kalaiselvi v. Chennai Port Trust to the Supreme Court’s 2026 declaration in Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India that an age-based restriction on adoptive maternity benefit violates Article 14. This judicial trajectory reflects a welcome and long-overdue recognition that motherhood, for legal purposes, cannot be confined to biological childbirth.

Yet, as this article has argued, the protection currently available to adoptive mothers remains incomplete precisely because it has developed through litigation rather than legislation. The Supreme Court’s ruling addressed Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020; it left the analogous threshold in the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 formally intact, and it did nothing to resolve the structural mismatch between CARA’s adoption timelines and any age-based cut-off. Fragmentation across statutes continues to produce unpredictable outcomes depending on a mother’s sector of employment.

It is submitted that Parliament should amend the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 to remove the three-month threshold in line with the constitutional reasoning in Hamsaanandini Nanduri, and that a single harmonised provision — applicable uniformly across public and private employment — should govern adoptive maternity benefit. Constitutional correction by the judiciary is necessary, but it is not a substitute for legislative clarity. Until Parliament acts, adoptive motherhood in India will remain a right vindicated case by case, rather than guaranteed in law.

Bibliography

Cases

Chanda Keswani v. State of Rajasthan, 2023 SCC OnLine Raj 3274 (India).

Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 246, W.P. (C) No. 960 of 2021 (S.C., Mar. 17, 2026) (India).

Kalaiselvi v. Chennai Port Trust, 2013 SCC OnLine Mad 811 (India) (also reported at 2013 (2) CTC 400*)*.

Geetha v. Kerala Livestock Dev. Bd. Ltd., 2015 SCC OnLine Ker 71 (India) (also reported at 2015 (1) KLJ 494*)*.

Pratiba Himral v. State of H.P., 2021 SCC OnLine HP 9295 (India).

Rama Pandey v. Union of India, 2015 SCC OnLine Del 10484 (India) (also reported at 221 (2015) DLT 756*)*.

Sadhna Agrawal v. State of Chhattisgarh, 2017 SCC OnLine Chh 19 (India) (also reported at MANU/CG/0017/2017*)*.

Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India, (2014) 4 S.C.C. 1 (India).

Statutes

Code on Social Security, 2020, No. 36, Acts of Parliament, 2020 (India).

Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956, No. 78, Acts of Parliament, 1956 (India).

Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, No. 2, Acts of Parliament, 2016 (India).

Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, No. 53, Acts of Parliament, 1961 (India), as amended by Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, No. 6, Acts of Parliament, 2017 (India).

Constitutional Provisions

India Const. art. 14.

India Const. art. 15, cl. 3.

India Const. art. 21.

India Const. art. 45.

Regulations

Cent. Adoption Res. Auth., Adoption Regulations, 2022, Ministry of Women & Child Development (India).

Government Reports

Cent. Adoption Res. Auth., Ministry of Women & Child Development, Adoption Statistics, https://cara.wcd.gov.in (India).

Foreign Legislation (Comparative)

Employment Rights Act 1996, c. 18 (UK).