Informal Women Workers Must Get Unconditional, Universal Maternity Benefits: Right to Food Campaign

Indian woman working in the organised sector—around 18 lakh in number—can avail 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. But more than 95% of women in the country are engaged in informal employment, and they are entitled to a wage compensation of less than half of the minimum wages, that too only for the first birth.

This was pointed out by the Right to Food Campaign, which has demanded that the maternity entitlements as per the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 be implemented immediately.
 
The NFSA 2013 mandates that a maternity benefit of at least Rs 6,000 to all pregnant women (except those working in government/public sector undertakings). But the government has not only failed to deliver this entitlement but has amended the law to reduce the benefit and make it more exclusionary, said the RTF on 30 January 2018.

For four years, the maternity scheme under the NFSA was running only as a pilot project in 53 districts, said Koninika Ray, member of the RTF and the National Federation of Indian Women, to Newsclick.

On 31 December 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a new maternity benefit programme to provide Rs 6,000 to all pregnant women. But last May, the Cabinet approved a severely truncated benefits programme.

The RTF said in a press statement that the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) has “deeply disappointed women, the Right to Food Campaign, and other advocates of mother and child health in India.”

To begin with, it is restricted only to the first birth. As RTF put it, this is “a conditionality shown to be fundamentally discriminatory to the most marginalised and vulnerable women from socially discriminated communities such as SC, ST and minorities, putting their lives at risk.”

The Campaign said that only 43% of the current live births in India are first order births (as per the Sample Registration System report on fertility indicators).

Secondly, the PMMVY actually provides just Rs 5,000 to pregnant women. “To appear to meet the legal threshold of Rs 6,000, the PMMVY is expressly merged with an older benefit scheme called the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY).”

But the purpose of JSY was to incentivise institutional deliveries, while the PMMVY is supposed to provide wage compensation, just as the Maternity Benefits Act does for the formal sector (both public and private).

“Not only has the government reduced the benefit, but they have made it conditional, only for the first child. But in a country like India, you cannot impose such conditionalities, when we still have such high rates of infant and maternal mortality,” Koninika Ray told Newsclick.

Indeed, the National Family Health Survey 2015-16 says that infant mortality rate is 41 deaths per 1,000 live births. One in 20 Indian children die before their 5 th birthday, while 38% of children under age five are stunted, which is a sign of chronic under-nutrition.

According to the World Health Organisation, 174 out of 100,000 Indian women die in childbirth. Whereas in countries like China and Brazil, 23 and 44 women out of 100,000, respectively, die in childbirth.

The RTF demands that universal and unconditional maternity entitlements of at least six months of the minimum wages for pregnant women and lactating mothers be implemented. They also demand that the upcoming budget allocation be increased from
Rs 2,700 crore to at least Rs 8,000 crore, which is 60% of Rs 13,000 crore, the amount necessary to meet the NFSA (assuming a birth rate of 19 per thousand and an effective coverage of 90%).
 
As the RTF said, “Maternity entitlements are a critical tool to fight malnutrition and infant and maternal mortality. A maternity entitlement recognises and validates women’s work, acknowledging women’s need for rest and replacement financial compensation around the time of their pregnancy and enabling them to breastfeed exclusively.”