Who cares? A gendered ideational political economy analysis of policy reforms in India’s Maternity Benefit Act (1919 - 2017)

<p dir="ltr">Care is a deeply gendered activity; disproportionately performed by women and girls in India. Care policies are therefore central to achieving gender equality. Maternity and parental leave policies acknowledge the interlocking concerns of women’s productive and reproductive roles. Studying the adoption of maternity benefit policy offers a unique opportunity to examine how social policy responds to dilemmas of reconciling women’s ‘carer’ and ‘economic actor’ identities.</p><p dir="ltr">My research deals with this dilemma, analysing India’s Maternity Benefit Act (MBA) as a policy case study across three legislative junctures in its hundred-year legislative history – 1929, 1961, and 2017. I scrutinize data from digital archival records (parliamentary debates, government policy documents, campaign literature of social movements), and 72 qualitative in-depth interviews conducted with elite policy actors. Adopting a comparative, historical, and interpretive process tracing research method, my enquiry into the politics of policymaking on care asks: why are care policies that aim to support women’s labour force participation, maternalistic and minoritarian, and how and why do such care policies get formulated and adopted in India?</p><p dir="ltr">I develop a Gendered Ideational Political Economy Analysis framework to conceptualize and analyze the role of gendered actors, gendered discourses, gender normative ideas, and underlying ethics in policymaking. I argue that care policymaking in India is a deeply moral endeavour, with policy actors emerging as ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who leverage normative opportunity structures by crafting moral discourses on care. Discourses and policy ideas gain dominance if they fall within a range of normative acceptability, which is determined by background public philosophies. I show two entrenched public philosophies to shape India’s MBA: a) mother -child as an indivisible dyad, and b) welfare capitalism in employment-linked social protection.</p><p dir="ltr">I contend that gender-equitable and redistributive care policies will need a new and feminist moral political economy, premised on principles of intersectionality and feminist political ethics of care. The originality and significance of this research rests in its interdisciplinary, multi-scalar, and critical policy analysis focus.</p>