Shivangi Khandelwal worked as a contractual consultant with the Rajasthan State Pollution Control Board. When she sought maternity leave, the authorities turned her down, pointing to a condition in her appointment order that they read as excluding her, as a contractual employee, from the benefit altogether. She challenged that refusal before the Rajasthan High Court at Jodhpur, and on October 16, 2026, Justice Bipin Gupta ruled in her favour, quashing the rejection and directing the Board to extend maternity benefits for 180 days from December 26, 2022, along with the remuneration admissible for that period.
The Board's stand rested entirely on the nature of Khandelwal's engagement. Because she held a contractual position rather than a regular or casual one, the authorities argued, the terms of her appointment order did not entitle her to the same maternity benefits a permanent employee would get as of right. The High Court rejected that framing outright. The nature of a woman's employment, whether regular, casual or contractual, cannot by itself be treated as a conclusive ground for denying maternity benefits, the court held, so long as she otherwise meets the statutory conditions that attach to the benefit.
Justice Gupta's judgment is built around the constitutional character of the right at stake rather than the fine print of any particular employment contract. Maternity leave is not simply a contractual perk that an employer can write in or write out at will; it flows from protections that attach to every working woman regardless of the label on her appointment letter. Treating a consultant or contractual employee as outside that protection, merely because her engagement letter uses a different word than 'permanent,' subordinates a statutory and constitutional entitlement to a drafting choice made unilaterally by the employer at the time of hiring.
That said, the court was equally clear that this was not a case of reading an open-ended right into the statute without limits. The court's holding is conditional on a woman actually meeting the eligibility conditions that go with the benefit, whatever the applicable scheme or rules require of a claimant. What it refuses to accept is an employer using the category of engagement itself, independent of whether those substantive conditions are met, as a shortcut to deny the claim. Once Khandelwal was shown to satisfy those conditions, her contractual status stopped being relevant to the outcome.
The order's operative part is specific. The Board was directed to extend maternity benefits to Khandelwal for a period of 180 days commencing December 26, 2022, together with the remuneration she would have been paid for that period had the leave been sanctioned when sought. The judgment was marked reportable, a signal that the High Court intended the ruling to carry beyond Khandelwal's own case and guide how public employers in the state treat similar claims from women engaged on contract, consultancy or other non-permanent terms.
For government departments, boards and corporations in Rajasthan that rely heavily on contractual and consultancy staff, the ruling closes off a line of defence that has been common in maternity leave disputes: pointing to the employment category as if that, on its own, settled the question. After this judgment, an appointment order's silence on maternity benefits, or a clause purporting to exclude them for contractual staff, will not survive scrutiny if the employee otherwise qualifies for the benefit under the governing rules or scheme.
The decision sits alongside a broader run of recent rulings from the same High Court extending maternity-related protections to women in non-traditional employment arrangements, including transfer protections for recently delivered employees and full statutory leave periods for teachers who change postings after childbirth. Read together, they signal that Rajasthan's courts are treating the maternity benefit as attaching to the fact of employment and childbirth, not to the particular contractual label an employer chooses to place on the relationship. That consistency across a run of cases, rather than a single isolated order, is what gives public employers in the state good reason to revisit their standard-form engagement letters now rather than wait for the next writ petition to force the point.