Same Salary, Smaller Job: What the Delhi HC Called Out at HashiCorp

The Law Said "Don't Demote Her." The Company Found a Way Around It Anyway.

Imagine you are HashiCorp's HR head reading Rakhi Bisht's file in mid-2024. The Maternity Benefit Act tells you plainly: you cannot dismiss her and you cannot alter her conditions of service to her disadvantage while she's on protected leave.

So you don't dismiss her. You don't cut her pay. You don't even change her title. On every metric a compliance checklist would ask about, you are clean. And yet the job you hand her back - clerical treasury work, three rungs below the managerial accounting role she spent 14 years building - is not, by any honest measure, the same job.

That is the exact gap the Delhi High Court stepped into on August 31, 2026 and it's worth sitting with why the gap existed at all before rushing to the court's verdict. The company's position, uncomfortable as it is to say, has an internal logic: nowhere in the Maternity Benefit Act or the Code on Social Security is there an explicit requirement that the returning employee's functional authority, not just her salary and title, be preserved.

Justice Sachin Datta's own judgment concedes this - "neither the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 nor the Code on Social Security, 2020, expressly prescribes a comprehensive framework for the post-maternity reintegration of women employees." An employer determined to minimise disruption to its org chart while staying technically compliant had, until this ruling, a genuine grey zone to work within.

What the court did was close that grey zone by reading it against the Constitution rather than the statute alone. Article 42 doesn't just gesture at "maternity relief"

• it directs the state toward humane conditions of work and the court read that, alongside Articles 14, 15 and 21, as meaning Section 12(1)'s protection against a "disadvantageous" change in service conditions has to cover reporting hierarchy, supervisory responsibility and functional status, not merely the number on the payslip. In the court's own words, the law "cannot be construed in a manner that allows its substantive guarantees to be circumvented through formal or cosmetic compliance." That phrase - cosmetic compliance - is the entire story in two words. It names a pattern where an employer meets every letter of a rule while defeating its purpose entirely and it is not unique to maternity leave; it is how organisations quietly neutralise inconvenient obligations across HR, environmental clearances and disclosure norms alike. What makes this ruling significant isn't just that Bisht won Rs 10 lakh. It's that the court built a specific, checkable test - same post ordinarily or a demonstrably equivalent one in pay grade, status, authority and growth prospects, with reasons given and objections heard - that closes the exact loophole HashiCorp exploited. For a UPSC aspirant, that's the real lesson: ethical compliance isn't measured by what a policy says on its face, but by whether the outcome it was designed to prevent still happens anyway.