The discourse on menstrual leave in India has evolved from a social taboo into a serious legal and policy debate. Rooted at the intersection of labour rights, gender justice, and public health, menstrual leave raises a fundamental question: should the law recognise biological difference to ensure substantive equality, or would such recognition inadvertently reinforce workplace discrimination? Recent judicial pronouncements, state-level initiatives, and corporate practice have brought the issue into sharp focus, making it a timely subject for legal analysis, one that cuts across constitutional law, labour welfare, and the everyday realities of India’s workforce.
Understanding Menstrual Leave: The Rationale
Menstrual leave refers to a policy that allows women and other menstruating individuals to take leave during their menstrual cycle on account of physical discomfort, pain, or related health issues. Dysmenorrhea affects a significant proportion of menstruating individuals, often impairing their ability to work efficiently. The rationale behind such leave lies in recognising menstrual health as a legitimate workplace concern, and in ensuring dignity, inclusivity, and productivity for those affected by it.
From a legal standpoint, the idea aligns with the broader constitutional framework of labour welfare and gender equality under Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution of India. The real challenge, however, lies in reconciling equality with non-discrimination: does differential treatment based on biological difference promote equality, or does it undermine it? This question is examined in detail below.
Current Legal Status in India
India does not currently have central legislation mandating menstrual leave. Neither the Factories Act, 1948, the various state Shops and Commercial Establishments Acts, nor the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 makes any provision for it, leaving the field entirely to state governments, institutions, and individual employers.
Karnataka has gone furthest. By a Government Order bearing No. LD 466 LET 2023, issued by the Labour Department on 20th November 2025,[1] the State introduced the Karnataka Menstrual Leave Policy, 2025. Under the order, women employees between the ages of 18 and 52, whether permanent, contractual, or outsourced, are entitled to one day of paid leave per month, capped at twelve days a year, across factories, shops, IT/ITES establishments, and government departments alike. Two features make the policy unusually progressive: it requires no medical certificate or disclosure of the underlying health reason, and it applies uniformly across the public and private sectors rather than being confined to government employees, as most earlier state measures were. The leave is non-accumulative and does not carry forward, and as commentators have pointed out, it does not, on its own terms, extend to the roughly six million workers in Karnataka’s informal and unorganised sectors, a gap that would later become the subject of litigation before the Karnataka High Court, discussed below.
Other State and Corporate Initiatives
Karnataka’s policy did not emerge in a vacuum. Bihar has, in fact, granted two days of paid special casual leave a month to its women government employees since 1992, the earliest such measure in the country, introduced during Lalu Prasad Yadav’s tenure as Chief Minister. Kerala’s Higher Education Department, building on a proposal that originated at Cochin University of Science and Technology, granted menstrual and maternity leave to female students across the State’s universities by an order dated 19th January 2023, and has since examined extending comparable relief to school students. Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra introduced one day of monthly menstrual leave for their women government employees in 2021, generally without deduction from regular leave entitlements, though, unlike Karnataka’s policy, each of these remained confined to public-sector employees.
Private employers have, in some respects, moved faster than the legislature. Zomato’s widely discussed ‘period leave’ policy, introduced in August 2020, allows employees who menstruate up to ten days of leave a year, availed without prior approval or explanation. Swiggy, Byju’s, Culture Machine, Gozoop, and Mathrubhumi are among the other private employers to have adopted comparable voluntary policies. These initiatives matter legally as well as socially: they demonstrate that menstrual leave is administratively workable, and they weaken the argument, voiced even by the Supreme Court itself, as discussed below, that such measures are inherently unworkable outside a narrow set of employers.
The Judicial Approach
The judiciary’s engagement with menstrual leave has been markedly more cautious than the executive’s, and it illustrates the classic institutional tension between the elected and unelected branches on questions of social policy.
The question has come before the Supreme Court in a public interest litigation filed by Advocate Shailendra Mani Tripathi, titled as Shailendra Mani Tripathi v. Union of India & Ors., W.P. (C) No. 172/2023, seeking a nationwide, mandatory menstrual leave policy for women students and workers. The petition has had a long and instructive procedural history. At a hearing on 8th July 2024, a Bench headed by the then Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud declined to issue any direction, observing that the matter was “actually a government policy aspect and not for the courts to look into,” and instead requested the Secretary, Ministry of Women and Child Development, “to look into the matter at the policy level and take a decision after consulting all stakeholders and see if a model policy can be framed.”[2] The Bench was careful to clarify that this did not preclude individual state governments from acting independently, an observation Karnataka would rely on within the year.
The same petition returned before the Court on 13th March 2026, this time before a Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant.[3] The Court reiterated its reluctance to mandate the policy nationally, and went further in explaining why: it cautioned that compelling employers by law to grant menstrual leave could deter the hiring of women altogether. “The moment you introduce it as a compulsory condition in law,” the Chief Justice observed, “you do not know the damage it will do to the career of women.” The Bench was concerned that a mandatory regime would make women appear a costlier hiring proposition than men, risking exactly the gender bias the policy was meant to remedy. Once again, the Court left the question to the executive, directing the Ministry to consider the petitioner’s representation and “examine the possibility of framing a policy on menstrual leave after consulting all relevant stakeholders”, but declined, across three years and bench headed by two Chief Justices, to convert that possibility into a judicially enforceable right.
High Courts have been considerably less restrained. In Chandravva Hanamant Gokavi v. State of Karnataka, W.P. No. 109734 of 2025, decided by the Karnataka High Court’s Dharwad Bench on 16th April 2026,[4] the petitioner, a 41-year-old hotel worker from Belagavi district, challenged the State’s failure to implement its own menstrual leave policy in the unorganised sector, where enforcement had been effectively absent. Justice M. Nagaprasanna held that the policy could not lawfully be confined to the organised sector, and directed the State to issue administrative guidelines ensuring its uniform application, and to frame rules once the proposed Karnataka Menstrual Leave and Hygiene Bill, 2025, which contemplates two days of monthly leave, work-from-home options, a two-percent attendance relaxation for menstruating students, and a dedicated grievance redressal authority is enacted. Rejecting the suggestion that gender-specific leave offends Article 14, the Court observed that “the call for menstrual leave is not a plea for privilege, but an assertion of dignity, fairness and humane understanding,” adding pointedly that “men and women stand equal in the eyes of the law; yet, they are biologically distinct.”
In grounding this conclusion, the Karnataka High Court drew on the Supreme Court’s own recent expansion of Article 21 in Dr. Jaya Thakur v. Government of India.[5] That case did not itself concern workplace leave: it arose from a writ petition seeking free sanitary napkins, functional toilets, and menstrual hygiene infrastructure for girl students in classes 6 to 12 across government and aided schools. Delivering judgment on 30 January 2026, the Supreme Court held that menstrual health is an inseparable facet of the right to life under Article 21 and of the right to education under Article 21A, memorably observing that “a period should end a sentence, not an education,” and issued a continuing mandamus requiring compliance within three months. The Karnataka High Court in Gokavi extended this reasoning from the classroom to the workplace, holding that any State measure “towards securing menstrual health and dignity… directly engages and advances the guarantees enshrined under Article 21” wherever it operates. The result is a doctrinal throughline, schools to workplaces, Delhi to Dharwad, even as the Supreme Court itself continues to resist converting that same reasoning into a nationally binding rule.
The International Landscape
India’s hesitation is not unique. Globally, statutory menstrual leave remains the exception rather than the norm, and where it exists, its design varies considerably. Japan has recognised a right to menstrual leave since Article 68 of its Labour Standards Act, 1947, but the leave is typically unpaid and, by most accounts, rarely claimed because of the stigma attached to invoking it. South Korea and Indonesia, the latter under Article 81 of its Manpower Act, guarantee broadly similar unpaid entitlements. Taiwan permits a limited number of menstrual leave days a year at half pay, in addition to ordinary sick leave. Zambia’s 2015 law, popularly called ‘Mother’s Day’, grants one day of paid leave a month without any requirement of medical proof, making it, in that respect, closer to Karnataka’s model than most. Spain became the first European Union country to legislate on the issue, in 2023, but took the opposite approach to Karnataka: its law requires a doctor’s authorisation before leave can be availed, with compensation paid through social security rather than by the employer directly.
The comparative picture is instructive in two respects. First, the trust-based, certificate-free design Karnataka has adopted is closer to the international exception than the rule; most jurisdictions condition the leave on medical involvement, precisely to guard against the employer-discrimination concern the Supreme Court has voiced. Second, even where such laws exist, uptake tends to be low, a pattern widely attributed to workplace stigma and the fear, whether or not statistically borne out, that availing the leave will be held against the employee. That gap between a right on the books and a right exercised in practice is precisely the risk the Supreme Court has flagged in declining to mandate the policy nationally, and it is a risk that Karnataka’s own implementation experience, culminating in the Gokavi litigation, has already begun to test.
The Equality Debate: Formal Versus Substantive Equality
The legal debate on menstrual leave turns on two competing notions of equality. The first is formal equality, which advocates identical treatment regardless of biological difference; under this view, menstrual leave may appear discriminatory, since it confers a benefit exclusively on women. The second is substantive equality, which holds that identical treatment can itself perpetuate inequality when individuals are differently situated. On this view, menstrual leave becomes a tool to level the playing field by accommodating biological realities.
From a legal standpoint, menstrual leave fits squarely within the constitutional vision of labour welfare and gender equality under Articles 14, 15, and 21. Article 14, which guarantees equality before the law and the equal protection of laws, imposes both negative and positive obligations on the State: while the negative obligation restrains the State from arbitrary discrimination, the positive dimension permits and at times requires affirmative measures to achieve real equality. The doctrine of reasonable classification under Article 14 gives effect to this positive dimension, permitting differential treatment where it is founded on an intelligible differentia bearing a rational nexus to the objective sought to be achieved. Article 15 expressly prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex, yet clause (3) carves out an important exception by empowering the State to make special provisions for women and children, a provision that reflects the Constitution’s own commitment to substantive equality.
Viewed through this lens, menstrual leave does not offend the principle of non-discrimination; rather, it gives effect to it. This is, in fact, well-trodden constitutional ground: the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, which confers benefits available exclusively to women on account of a biological function unique to them, has never seriously been challenged as discriminatory against men, precisely because it responds to a real physiological difference rather than an artificial classification. Menstrual leave sits on the same constitutional footing, differing from maternity benefit chiefly in frequency and degree, not in kind.
Conclusion: Between Constitutional Promise and Social Reality
While the constitutional framework under Articles 14, 15, and 21 clearly permits and, after Jaya Thakur, arguably encourage, protective measures of this kind, the ground reality presents a more complex picture than the doctrine alone suggests. The Supreme Court’s repeated refusal to mandate menstrual leave nationally, across hearings in 2024 and 2026, reflects a genuine and not unfounded apprehension that a compulsory regime could disadvantage women by reinforcing hiring bias, a concern the international experience, where uptake of even well-established menstrual leave laws remains low, does little to dispel. Karnataka’s own experience is a useful test case: a policy adopted with unusual care to avoid stigmatising conditions, no medical certificate, no disclosure requirement, still required a High Court’s intervention within five months of the Gokavi petition to secure implementation even in the organised sector, let alone the unorganised sector the policy was never designed to reach.
This points to a deeper structural question beneath the doctrinal one: whether Indian workplaces are yet egalitarian enough to absorb a measure of this kind without penalising the very women it is meant to protect. In this sense, the debate on menstrual leave exposes a genuine gap between constitutional idealism and socio-economic reality, and the issue does not lend itself to a straitjacket resolution. The way forward, perhaps, lies in precisely the calibrated approach the Supreme Court has repeatedly gestured towards but declined to design itself: legal recognition, whether at the state level, as in Karnataka, or eventually through central legislation, paired with robust safeguards against its misuse in hiring decisions, the institutional flexibility the Karnataka High Court has now mandated, and sustained societal sensitisation to close the gap between a right conferred on paper and a right women feel able to exercise in practice.
[1]G.O. No. LD 466 LET 2023, Labour Department, Government of Karnataka, dated 20 November 2025, published in the Karnataka Gazette the same day.
[2]Shailendra Mani Tripathi v. Union of India & Ors., W.P. (C) No. 172/2023, order dated 8 July 2024, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 1694.
[3]Shailendra Mani Tripathi v. Union of India & Ors., W.P. (C) No. 172/2023, order dated 13 March 2026 (unreported at the time of writing).
[4]Chandravva Hanamant Gokavi v. State of Karnataka, W.P. No. 109734 of 2025, Karnataka High Court (Dharwad Bench), order dated 16 April 2026.
[5]Dr. Jaya Thakur v. Government of India, 2026 INSC 97.
