Love Instinct: A file picture of filmmaker and scriptwriter Vinta Nanda with her adopted daughter

It didn’t take Sudha Vemuri long to realise that adopting a child was not just about bringing a baby home and loving her for life. Instead, it was a huge conditioning process. “We had to create our mental make-up as parents. We had to prepare our family and friends,” says Vemuri, assistant editor with the Delhi office of the English daily, The Hindu.

Vemuri and her journalist husband, V.V.P Sharma, had anticipated that these issues would crop up when they decided to adopt a daughter in 2002. What they did not anticipate was that Vemuri’s application for a three-month maternity leave would be rejected. “I was told the company did not have any provision for granting maternity leave to adoptive parents,” recalls Vemuri. She had to go on leave without pay to be with her three-month-old during the critical initial days.

But now, organisations are changing track. As more and more single women and childless couples opt for adoption ? the Karnataka State Adoption Agency (KSAA) claims to get 50 to 60 adoption inquiries from single women each year ? companies are modifying people practices to suit employee needs. Quite a few of them are now offering maternity leave to women employees who are about to adopt a child.

Take the IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), for instance. In December last year, the company started a policy of granting maternity leave to women employees who would adopt a child. The company received a phenomenal feedback to the scheme, says S. Padmanabhan, head Global HR, TCS. “Based on the feedback, we extended the benefit of three months’ paid adoption leave to male associates from July this year,” adds Padmanabhan.

Although adoption leave is yet to be availed of at TCS, Padmanabhan says there have been a lot of queries about the policy.

“With many working women opting to remain single and the number of childless couples on the rise, adoption is a new social reality in upper middle class India,” says Dr Ali Khwaja, secretary, KSAA, and head of Bangalore-based counselling centre, Banjara Academy. Khwaja claims the KSAA has a waiting list of adoptive parents that runs into hundreds.

Bangalore-based biotechnology firm, Biocon, introduced its adoption leave policy two years ago. “It is a proactive policy initiated by the company to promote adoption,” says Gautam Reddy, head, human resources, Biocon. As an add-on initiative, the company offers the services of its legal department to employees to help with the paperwork involved in adoption. Two employees have availed of adoption leave at Biocon so far.

Bangalore-based Tesco Hindustan Service Centre (Tesco HSC) has an adoption leave policy too. Its HR head Sudheesh Venkatesh says, “Trends drive HR policies. The norm of single parents and couples adopting children is rapidly gaining acceptance in India. And companies are initiating flexible policies to cater to this changing social scenario,” he adds.

Tesco anticipated that at some stage, adoption might become an option for its employees. “Most employees are in the age group of 24 to 34 years. This is the age when people take family-related decisions,” Venkatesh says.

Tesco has already had one of its employees availing of adoption leave. “He found it extremely useful. It gave him quality time to help him understand and bond with his child,” says Venkatesh.

Khwaja feels a three-month leave is more important for adoptive parents than natural parents. “Orphan children don’t know what it means to belong. They need the constant presence of parents to acclimatise them to a family situation,” he says.

It works both ways. For adoptive parents, there is no nine months of planning on pink rooms or blue knickers. While love comes instinctively to natural parents, adoptive parents need to mentally prepare themselves to shower affection on their child.

Shivani, who worked as a counsellor at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, a New Delhi-based public school, was banking on the school principal to grant her maternity leave when she adopted a daughter. “Though the school had no precedent, the principal agreed,” recalls Shivani.

Shivani found that the first three months were critical to an adoptive parent-child relationship. “My daughter did not know how to react to parental love. She would have been further confused had I gone out to work for a good part of the day,” says Shivani.

However, even as companies roll out leave benefits to adoptive parents, the adoption battle remains only half won. “Parents don’t want to talk about why and how they opt for adoption. Even now, there seems to be some sort of a stigma attached to the whole business of adoption,” says Biocon’s Reddy. A Biocon employee recently adopted a child and went on maternity leave, but it’s an experience she doesn’t want to share with anyone.

With additional reporting by Anirban Das Mahapatra in New Delhi