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On Tuesday (March 17), a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan delivered judgment in Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India striking down the three-month age cap on adopted children under Section 60(4) of the Code on Social Security, 2020. The provision enables a woman who legally adopts a child below the age of three months to claim maternity benefit for a period of 12 weeks from the date the child is handed over to her. 

The decision marks a huge relief to adoptive mothers, besides building a constitutional architecture around adoption, reproductive autonomy, and the welfare of children. It also ends with an explicit legislative nudge to parliament on paternity leave – technically obiter, but impossible to ignore when it appears in a reportable judgment of this court.

The provision under challenge had a deceptively simple structure. When parliament extended maternity benefit to adoptive and commissioning mothers through the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 – a provision later subsumed into the Code on Social Security, 2020, which came into force on 21 November 2025 – it qualified the entitlement by reference to the age of the adopted child.

Only a woman who adopted a child below the age of three months was entitled to twelve weeks of maternity benefit. A woman who adopted a four-month-old received nothing. The petitioner, an adoptive mother of two children who filed her petition under Article 32, challenged this cut-off as violative of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, among other grounds.

The court’s equality analysis is its most technically rigorous contribution. Applying the two-pronged test of intelligible differentia and rational nexus drawn from State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar (1952) and the under-inclusiveness doctrine elaborated in State of Gujarat v. Shri Ambica Mills Ltd. (1974), the Bench found the three-month threshold wanting on both counts.

The object of maternity benefit – to support the transition into motherhood, safeguard the welfare of the child, and enable continued participation of women in the workforce – applies with equal force to an adoptive mother regardless of........

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