India’s crèche scheme and the laws that govern childcare facilities | Explained  Premium

The Hindu explains the functioning of India’s National Crèche Scheme and what research shows about childcare services‘ impact on women’s participation in the labour force.

In 2008, a survey of women working in Tamil Nadu’s Viluppuram district raised a question— can quality childcare facilities increase and sustain women’s participation in the Indian economy? “If there were someone to take care of my child,” one woman said, “why would I not go to work? Is [the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act] not important for my very survival?”

The Karnataka Government recently drew attention to this link. It announced the opening of childcare centres across 4,000 gram panchayats under the Koosina Mane scheme. The scheme is for women with children between six months and six years, who are employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), as well as for those who live in the area. This “essential public infrastructure” has a bearing not only on women’s economic agency and well-being, but would positively impact children’s health and education, evidence shows.

Daycare facilities across different sectors respond to the complex realities of women’s unpaid work and their diminishing presence in the workforce. Gendered roles assign childcare responsibilities to women, often binding young mothers to the household. It keeps them from meaningfully participating in the economy, or in other cases fully dropping out, congealing into India’s low female labour force participation rates, which dropped from 32% in 2005 to 19% in 2021, per data (Men’s participation, on the other hand, has gradually improved).

The Hindu looks at the role crèches play in regulating women’s mobility within the economy, and how inadequate funding and poor compliance with rules have shaped childcare infrastructure.

Several policies between 1986 and 2005 recognised the need for childcare, culminating in the Rajiv Gandhi National Crèche Scheme for the Children of Working Mothers (RGNCS) in 2006. The Union Government has since reformulated the framework twice: once, in 2017, when RGNCS was discontinued and implemented as the centrally-sponsored ‘National Crèche Scheme’ (NCS), and then, in 2022, when the NCS was revised and subsumed as part of the ‘Palna’ scheme under Mission Shakti, “to provide day-care facilities for children (six months to six years) of working mothers and to improve nutrition and health status of children.”

The scheme provides support to women of low-income groups who go to work at least 15 days a month, or six months a year. They can avail of crèche facilities available for 7.5 hours a day, 26 days a month. The subsidised facilities charge ₹20 a month per child for families below the poverty line, and between ₹100-200 for other families. Each crèche is required to provide “holistic development of children,” a space tasked with providing quality nutrition, sleep, education and “stimulation” activities. A creche of 25 children, say, should at least have one creche worker, helper and doctor, the NCS guidelines note.

The NCS falls under the umbrella of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) under the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD). Per the revised policy, 60% of funding comes from the Union Government, 30% from State Government and 10% from individual NGOs. State Governments were made responsible for making, enforcing and monitoring the relevant rules.