For decades, the conversation around workplace benefits in India followed a predictable script: health insurance, a provident fund, and a maternity policy. Fertility rarely entered the room — not because it wasn't a lived reality for millions of employees, but because it was, and largely remains, unspeakable in a professional setting. A woman undergoing IVF was more likely to invent a vague medical excuse than tell her manager the truth.
Merck, the 358-year-old German pharmaceutical and science company, is trying to change that script — and it is doing so from an unusual vantage point. As one of the world's leading players in infertility treatment through its healthcare business, Merck doesn't just sell the science of fertility treatment; since late 2023, it has built a company-wide benefit around it in India, one of the first markets globally to receive the program.
"We are leaders globally in infertility treatment," says Pratima Reddy, Managing Director for Merck's healthcare business in India and the company's country spokesperson. "If you look at the global picture, infertility-related topics are affecting at least one in six couples. It is a real challenge."
That statistic, delivered almost matter-of-factly, quietly justifies a program that has already helped more than 760 employees worldwide, backed by close to $4 million (roughly ₹40 crore) in global investment since launch.
Why now?
Merck's calculus wasn't born purely out of altruism, nor was it a knee-jerk reaction to the post-pandemic wellness wave that swept through corporate India. According to Reddy, the trigger was structural: women are choosing to have children later, often deep into demanding careers in their 30s, at precisely the moment when professional stakes are highest.
‘More women are choosing to have children in their 30s," she explains, "often at a time when they are also progressing in their careers. As a company, we want to ensure that our people do not feel they have to choose between their career and starting a family.”
Add to that a workforce that has visibly shifted — Merck employs over 4,500 people in India, its third-largest employee base globally, spanning healthcare, life sciences R&D, semiconductor materials manufacturing and a large captive Global Capability Centre (GCC) — and the demographic argument becomes hard to ignore. Late millennials and early Gen Z employees, Reddy notes, are "global citizens," shaped by social media and less willing to separate their personal life stages from what they expect from an employer.
Fertility support, she says, falls under a global philosophy Merck calls "family forward workplaces"; the idea that supporting employees through reproductive choices shouldn't be a bolt-on perk but "the bare minimum" a modern employer owes its people.
The hardest part is the silence
Designing a fertility benefit, it turns out, is the easy part. Getting employees to actually use it, in a culture still uncomfortable discussing infertility openly, is the real challenge.
"There is still a lot of taboo," Reddy admits. "Women still hesitate to talk to their managers or to their peers if they are undergoing IVF treatment." Even discussing the topic externally — through case studies of employees the benefit has helped — remains difficult. Obviously, the stigma comes into the picture.
Merck's answer has been to attack the stigma indirectly, through a broader architecture of psychological safety: mandatory unconscious-bias and inclusive-leadership training for every manager, three active employee resource groups (branded internally as "I Am Able," "I Am Proud" and "I Am Equal"), confidential speak-up lines, and — critically — a design in which employees never have to disclose their fertility treatment to a manager at all.
The process, Reddy explains, runs much like standard medical insurance through a third-party administrator, meaning an employee can quietly undergo IVF, absorb a difficult outcome if it doesn't succeed, and never have to explain an absence that never officially needs explaining.
There is a perception that undergoing IVF means stepping away from work for an extended period, but that is not necessarily the case. “I know of people who have continued to be very much present at work, including travelling, while undergoing treatment," Reddy asserts “With the right support and flexibility, employees can continue to contribute and remain engaged in their work.”
Measuring what doesn't show up on a spreadsheet
Ask any CFO about a multi-million-dollar wellness line item and the same question surfaces: what's the ROI? Reddy’s answer resists the framing entirely. Merck doesn't isolate fertility benefits and demand a discrete return, she says — it evaluates its entire "total rewards" package against industry benchmarks and tracks sentiment through a global Employee Engagement Survey, run twice yearly, where questions about benefit awareness and satisfaction feed directly back to leadership.
“We look at this at a much broader level," she says. “The belief is that when you get the overall employee experience right from benefits and wellbeing to culture and inclusion - that is what ultimately drives engagement and retention.”
Merck's India healthcare business has consistently scored in the 94–95 range on internal engagement metrics — a figure that has climbed further since Reddy’s tenure began, correlating, in her telling, with greater openness around exactly these conversations.
A template, not just a perk
What makes Merck's experiment worth watching isn't the benefit itself — several large multinationals now offer versions of fertility coverage — but the theory of change underneath it: that a company selling the science of reproduction has both the expertise and, arguably, the obligation to extend that same support inward, to its own employees, in a market where discussing infertility can still feel like admitting failure.
Whether that logic trickles down to India's vast base of mid-sized, domestically run employers — the companies where such benefits remain rare to nonexistent — is an open question, and one Merck's leadership seems keenly aware of. "It's not just about our company," Reddy says. "It's technically about the fertility rate of the country as well."
For now, the numbers are modest against India's total workforce, and the silence around the subject inside offices remains stubborn. But for a policy barely three years old, in a country only beginning to have this conversation, that may be the point: not a finished solution, but a deliberate, ongoing attempt to make an unspoken struggle a little easier to speak about.