Bengal has slashed the childcare leave entitlement of schoolteachers to a maximum of 60 consecutive days after school heads were swamped by applications seeking up to 730 days of uninterrupted leave at short notice.

The curtailment comes within three months of Mamata Banerjee announcing that all women working in schools, colleges and universities would be entitled to two years of paid childcare leave on a par with government employees.

Sources said schools were flooded with leave applications from the day the new childcare rule took effect on August 1. "A teacher in my school whose son was just six months short of 18 when the announcement came immediately went on a four-month holiday," said a headmaster who didn't wish to be named.

The head of a school with two geography teachers and two history teachers for classes VIII to XII said all four took childcare leave at the same time, leaving colleagues who teach in the junior classes to fill in for them.

Several schools have been unable to find replacements for teachers in certain subjects, a source in the school education department said.

Science teachers are scarce anyway and one headmistress spoke of her predicament when the only maths teacher in her school for the senior classes applied for childcare leave.

What makes refusing leave difficult for school heads is the definition of childcare. A working mother can go on leave for her child's education, health or any such reason till the son or daughter turns 18.

The provisions remain unchanged except that the state government has cut the duration of uninterrupted leave. The revised order, issued recently, states that school employees can take a maximum of 60 days of childcare leave at a stretch, which in "exceptional circumstances" can be increased to 120 days. The total entitlement remains 730 days.

The original government order on extending the benefit to schoolteachers states that childcare leave "...will be admissible during the entire period of service for taking care of up to 2 (two) children up to 18 years of their age, whether for rearing or to look after any of their needs like examination, sickness etc".One clause says leave "may not be granted for less than 15 days in a spell". The revised order specifies the upper limit, which the original one hadn't.

In schools, employees taking long leave creates a problem because the job of an absentee teacher cannot be done by a colleague specialising in another subject, unlike in offices where staff members are shuffled across verticals.

Education minister Partha Chatterjee confirmed that too many teachers going on long leave was disrupting the academic schedule. "The government has taken the right decision by extending childcare leave to all teachers as every mother has the right to take care of her children. But at the same, we don't want academic activity to suffer. We won't allow misuse of the privilege," he told Metro.

Heads of several schools welcomed the government's move to prevent teachers from suddenly going on long leave. Dipak Das, a former general secretary of the West Bengal Government Schoolteachers' Association, urged the government to arrange replacements while granting childcare leave to teachers.

Childcare leave has, of course, been the subject of a debate the world over. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had faced a storm of protests for announcing that she would take only a couple of weeks off for the birth of her twins later this year.

She had done the same for the birth of her son in 2012. Under her, Yahoo has doubled paid maternity leave to 16 weeks but her critics say that she is making life difficult for working women not only in Yahoo but everywhere else by going public about her short maternity leave. Many women face medical and other complications that she hasn't had to and can't afford the kind of childcare that she can, Marissa's critics argue.