We, in the business of day-care services ,empower women who wish to come out of their homes and work outside, by taking care of their children so that they could work comfortably at their work places.

On behalf of lacs of women who want to get back to work, we want the Government of India to include services of Day-care in the essential services and allow us to open the Day-care centres.

Day-care centres are facilitators for women getting back to work and therefore this humanitarian appeal is on behalf of those women who work with us and also those women who were able to get back to work as their children were looked after by us in our Day-care centres.  

Overall women participation in India Inc. had been stuck at 20%. However post 2016, India Inc saw improvement in this percentage due to Gender Diversity Agenda being introduced by the Government and picked up across many companies, in addition to that in 2017 after the Revised Maternity Benefit Act the women participation in India Inc saw further improvement, however, COVID has put them back at home in the traditional role of looking after their homes and children.

There are over 300,000 Preschools, Day Care Centres, Creches and Anganwadis in the country and each of them employs 5 women on an average. Each of these centres cater to about 50 children. Together, they enable over 20 million women employees to engage meaningfully in their employment at home, farms, and offices. 

The lockdown has disrupted these women’s livelihoods. Most of the 1 million women workers employed in this industry come from low-income households and are the chief breadwinner for their families. 

Absence of childcare has forced many women to quit from work. Increasing demands from all sides have made it impossible for them to continue work. As cost-cutting measure organizations are quick to ask women to quit and are retaining male employees who do not have these added responsibilities.
 
The Indian childcare industry is small at present and is thus the services are often wrongly clubbed with schools, instead of being treated as an essential service. Schools have learning and evaluation of learning as the main agenda, whereas childcare has caregiving as the primary focus. 

While education can be imparted digitally, care cannot be. Children need to be looked after and cared for. 

Schools have a large number of children in the premises and the average child-adult ratio is 1:20 whereas the number of children coming to a particular Day-care centre is restricted to 25-30 children and goes up to 150 children at max in few large centres.

In the Day-care centre average child adult ratio is 1:5. Rules for Hygiene and social distancing can be followed as the numbers are small.

Parents always have the discretion to avail or not avail the Day-care services. Not attending Day-care would not put any child behind in evaluations, which is not the case with schools. In case schools open, then mandatory attendance and evaluations will force unwilling parents to send the children to schools.

The Day-cares are set up to provide support to women who are employed by the corporates. We follow corporate calendars and working hours so that women working in corporates are supported. We at the Day-cares are extremely busy when schools are closed but Corporates are working.

We understand that the present Government is keen on bringing more women to the workforce and is actively pursuing the agenda through various schemes and legal amendments like the Maternity Benefit Act.

Thus we again appeal to treat Day-care as an essential service and allow the day-care industry to operate in India.