LocationsBy Amit Kumar and Karina Bhasin / UNDP India
Caring for India’s Future: How Community Childcare is Empowering Families in Delhi’s Bawana
October 29, 2025
Every morning, Bharati walks through Bawana, an industrial area in north-west Delhi, India’s capital, holding her daughters’ tiny hands. Jagruti, three and a half, skips ahead, while little Aakriti clings to her mother. For Bharati, this simple walk is a choice she never had before, the choice to work, earn for her family, and know her children are safe, cared for, and learning. In neighbourhoods like Bawana, where factories, workshops, and daily wage jobs shape routines for most families, such choices often go unnoticed but quietly reshape lives.
The invisible cost of unpaid care
Bawana is one of the city’s major resettlement colonies, home to thousands of families relocated from informal settlements in search of better livelihoods. It hosts clusters of small and medium factories, and many households rely on shift based work and informal jobs with long hours and variable pay. With her husband as the sole earner and no affordable childcare nearby, Bharati had no choice but to stay home. The nearest government run anganwadi centre served mostly children over three and ran only for a few hours, leaving infants like Aakriti without structured care. “I couldn’t work at all,” Bharati recalls. “Even stepping out for a few hours felt impossible.”
Her story reflects a wider reality across India, where the unequal distribution of unpaid care work limits women’s economic opportunities. Women aged 15 to 59 spend more than five hours a day on unpaid domestic work, almost three times more than men, and over two hours on unpaid caregiving. At the same time, more than 80 percent of working women are employed in the informal economy, often without access to childcare, stable hours, or social protection. This imbalance is particularly stark in low-income urban areas, where a day’s wages often sustain the entire family. Without accessible childcare, women are unable to earn, upskill, or pursue education.
Quality childcare does more than support working mothers. It enables families to participate more fully in the economy and ensures children have the best start in life.
For families like Bharati’s, safe and reliable childcare is more than a service, it is a bridge to participation, stability, and dignity. Recognizing this, a newly established community childcare centre in Bawana is helping parents reclaim both time and opportunity.
A centre built with the community
Supported by UNDP India under its project ‘Boosting Female Labour Force Participation through Strengthened Urban Childcare’, and implemented by Mobile Creches in collaboration with local NGOs, the centre serves children aged six months to six years from low income households. It operates six days a week, for eight hours a day, aligning with the long and unpredictable work schedules of local factory and informal sector workers.
An affordable user fee of 1,000 INR per month (around 12 USD), decided through community consultations, keeps the service within reach while fostering shared responsibility. This locally anchored, community led model blends parent contributions with institutional and philanthropic support, demonstrating a financially viable approach that can be scaled and replicated by urban local bodies across Indian cities.
The centre offers structured early childhood education, nutrition, health monitoring, and individualised care, delivered by trained local women caregivers who earn fair wages and receive certified and incremental skill development. Each day is designed for holistic growth. Infants and toddlers receive attentive feeding, hygiene, and play based learning, while older children engage in preschool activities that strengthen language, numeracy, and social skills.
Nutrition is a cornerstone. Children receive two cooked meals and a snack daily, in line with India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) standards, and their growth is regularly tracked to ensure healthy development. Parental engagement sessions help families understand nutrition, responsive caregiving, and early learning.
This centre is redefining norms around childcare, showing that it is not only support for working mothers, but shared social infrastructure that enables families to work and live with dignity.
Transforming lives, one family at a time
For Phoolmani, the change has been deeply personal. Her daughter Anushka was born prematurely, and for months, she hesitated to return to work. “I had stopped working because she needed constant care,” she says. “Now, I can go to the factory knowing she’s eating well, playing safely, and learning new things every day.”
Deepak, father of four-year-old Avinash, represents another shift the centre hopes to nurture, where caregiving is seen as a shared responsibility, not only a woman’s burden. After his wife’s passing, Deepak struggled to balance work and raising his son. “Avinash barely spoke to anyone,” he recalls. “Since joining the centre, he’s opened up, he talks, plays, and even sings rhymes at home. It feels like both of us are healing.”
Early results and the road ahead
Within six months, early insights from the centre point to promising outcomes, average attendance at 85 percent, improved child nutrition, and visible gains in children’s social and emotional development. To capture and strengthen these outcomes systematically, the project is implementing robust Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation framework tracking child development, women’s economic participation, and family wellbeing. This is generating evidence to refine services and guide replication in other low-income urban communities. Regular parent feedback continues to shape how the centre evolves, ensuring it remains responsive and community driven.
The economics of care
The Bawana Childcare Centre illustrates the essence of caring economics in action, showing how affordable, quality childcare strengthens families and local economies. Investing in care is not only social policy, but also sound economic strategy. Global studies suggest that every 1 US dollar invested in childcare can yield up to 3 dollars in economic returns through higher productivity, employment, and wellbeing.
For India’s growing cities, expanding community childcare is not only a social intervention, but also an investment in equity, opportunity, and the future of urban families.