Child and Maternity Care Benefits- A Boon to Working Women for Social Protection

Abstract

Societal structure is throwing away more responsibilities to working women than men. Women are more responsive in maintaining Family and children. Even though the responsibilities are shared by men in some classes, the women were not fully and equally shared their burden of work both at their personal and official work-life. The structure and nature of the works of the women were diverse in nature. Even now we can take our rural villages as our examples, where both women and men are working at farming fields or at construction fields that the women also have to do the entire works at their home after their works from outside for earning and the other gender may not be forced to do the home works as women do. It is actually our conventional attitude of Mind in the society. In fact, the Income of the women is also varied in different sectors. In general not all the women are getting same income for the same work as men gets. This is where the differences were found. Apart from that, not all the sectors and organizations are giving equal benefit for working women in all aspects especially in child and maternity care benefits. There are differences among the states in implementing the same benefits to working women. For example some states and their institutions are allowing women workers of some cadres to take child care leave for two years, study leave for one year and so on. Some state institutions are not allowing the women to benefit out of the schemes for women. There are framing their own laws and they approve on their own with their bodies. These sorts of differences in availing existing benefits are also the great burden to working women. And even from state to state the natures of child care and maternity benefits are different. But our Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is focusing on improving the maternal and child health by 2015. Therefore the government of India is taking serious effort to provide uniform and maximum benefits to all women through the Child Care and Maternity Benefit Scheme. The present study aims to analyze the available child care facilities and maternity benefit schemes in India and the also tries to reveal the factors associated with the promotion of social protection for working women India through these schemes. A cross sectional study was conducted among the women benefited under child and maternity care facilities.