Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India (17 March 2026) strikes down what looks like a minor line in a very large statute. Read closely, it tells you a lot about how the Supreme Court now approaches equality claims, and about how far it will go when it fixes a defective law.

The issue

Can the law give a woman who adopts a child less protection than a woman who gives birth, or than one who adopts a younger child? Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020 did exactly that. It offered 12 weeks of maternity benefit to a woman who legally adopts a child, but only if the child was below three months. Adopt a four-month-old, or a six-year-old, and the provision gave you nothing.

The cap was not a fresh idea of the Code's drafters, either. It was carried over from the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, as amended in 2017.

What the bench decided

Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan struck down the cap on 17 March 2026, finding that Section 60(4) offends Articles 14 and 21. An adoptive mother is now entitled to 12 weeks of leave whatever the child's age.

The bench did not just delete words and leave the gap. It spelled out how the provision must now be read: a woman who legally adopts a child, or a commissioning mother, gets 12 weeks of maternity benefit from the date the child is handed over.

The reasoning

The interesting part of the judgment is not the 12-week number. It is the reason the bench gives for refusing to draw the line at three months.

Article 14 lets the law treat different people differently, but the line has to make sense. There must be a real difference between the two groups, the intelligible differentia, and that difference must connect to what the law is trying to achieve, the rational nexus. The bench found the connection missing. Maternity benefit, it said, is about the process of motherhood, not the process of childbirth. Seen that way, a woman adopting a nine-month-old has the same role, the same responsibilities and the same caregiving obligations as one adopting a two-month-old. They are similarly situated, and the three-month cut-off was artificial.

The government had two answers. An older child, it argued, depends less intensively on the caregiver. And creche facilities under Section 67 of the Code, it said, already offer an alternative. The bench was not persuaded by either. A creche obligation only arises for establishments with 50 or more employees, so it cannot be the safety net for everyone. More to the point, daytime care is not a substitute for a mother being present while a child is settling into a new family. That is also where Article 21 enters the picture: the cap left adoptive families without adequate time to care for the child.

There is a lineage here. Suchita Srivastava (2009) treated reproductive and family choices as part of personal liberty, and Deepika Singh (2022) read maternity entitlements broadly enough to cover atypical families. What the bench does now is change the question. The law had been asking whether this woman gave birth, or adopted a very young child. The bench asks what a parent actually needs in order to care for the child. Once you frame it that way, recovery from childbirth stops being the point of the benefit, and caregiving takes its place.

Three things worth scrutinising

The remedy. Courts usually strike a provision down or read it down. Here the bench effectively rewrote the sentence. Supporters will say there was no alternative, since striking the age limit alone might have left adoptive mothers with no clear entitlement. Critics will say this edges into legislation. The gap between reading down and reading in is thin, and the Court has not always been consistent about where it falls.

How far it actually reaches. The benefit attaches to employment covered by the Code, and most Indian women work in the informal sector, so most of them are unlikely to feel any difference. The judgment fixes the statute book. It does nothing about the coverage gap. Employers who kept the old text in their policies are now exposed, and law firms are already advising them to update HR policies, handbooks and payroll systems.

Who gets left out. The bench asked the Centre to bring in a provision recognising paternity leave as a social security benefit, but stopped at urging, which is arguably the right institutional call. Still, the logic of the ruling points further than the bench went. If the benefit follows caregiving and not biology, then reserving it for mothers rests on an assumption about who does the caring. Adoptive fathers and single adoptive fathers currently have no statutory claim under this framework.

Why it matters

Courts have traditionally deferred to Parliament on welfare legislation, often on fiscal grounds. This judgment applies the Article 14 test to a social welfare provision anyway, and asks whether the classification serves the law's own purpose. It also signals to the executive that arbitrary eligibility cut-offs in benefit schemes can be challenged. Any provision that ties a benefit to a rigid age, category or documentary threshold should now expect to be tested against its stated purpose.

The way forward

The ball is now with Parliament and the Labour Ministry. Three things would help. Section 60(4) should be amended so the statute matches the judgment. Paternity and shared parental leave should be legislated, as the bench suggested. And small employers need clear guidance on what they now owe. Without these, a constitutional victory may stay patchy in practice, with enforcement depending on which workers can afford to litigate.