Maternity leave can’t be denied during probation: Maha tribunal

Maternity leave can’t be denied during probation: Maha tribunal

Apr 21, 2024, 04.54 AM IST

Mumbai: Probation should not be an obstacle to a woman who wants to be a mother during the period, held Maharashtra Administrative Tribunal, quashing a 2015 state order denying maternity leave to a then 28-year-old assistant forest conservator in Mumbai. A probationer’s seniority should not suffer if she wants to be a mother which is her basic human and natural right, held MAT.

The state, being a welfare and progressive state, has guaranteed 180-day maternity leave to every woman employee, stated the MAT judgment pronounced on Friday by its member Medha Gadgil. Such leave is as much a right of the newborn to be with the mother as it is the mother’s to be with the child, it held in an application filed last year by the woman, now a divisional forest conservator at SGNP. She had challenged the 2015 order.

The forest dept in Jan 2015 “illegally” regularised as “extraordinary leave” the 180 days of maternity & an additional 43 days of post-natal leave taken in 2013 by public servant while on probation.

In 2023, the state, failing to consider her maternity leave, held her probation had ended in March 2015 instead of mid-2014 and it cost her her seniority, argued her lawyer.

Any probationer, though, must mandatorily complete the period of one or two years, held MAT, saying the solution lay in changing the method to compute the probation period. Probation can be extended for an employee’s assessment only if the person’s performance in the corresponding months on her resuming work is found “unsatisfactory”, ruled MAT. If her work is satisfactory in the 180-day period after she resumes work post maternity, her seniority would be deemed from the end date of her original probation period, along with her batchmates, said MAT. Such a mechanism would ensure govt gets sufficient and legally mandated period to appraise the probationer and “similarly valuable rights” of a child to be with the mother and mother’s to be with the child are protected, the judgment noted.

“Seniority of female employees should not go below her batchmates on grounds of her maternity leave,” MAT held and directed that her 180 days’ leave be treated as maternity leave and 43 additional days as childcare leave.