Thousands of kids in need of daycare in Gurugram, creches just a handful

Lajjo, a 20-year-old labourer, visits a crèche in Gurugram’s Sector 48 during lunchtime every day to breastfeed her three-month-old child. It’s a comfort to Lajjo that her child is safe while she is away at work. “It’s better than staying in the village with kids, while our men go to work,” she says.
There are four on-site crèches in the city, run by the Delhi chapter of Mobile Crèche that has 35 units at construction sites in the NCR, providing services to 25 builders. “Parents work more productively and the risk of accidents (involving kids) comes down,” says NGO’s programme manager Rila Kayanti.

The NGO has observed that their facilities also help create awareness among migrant families and when they move to other locations, they demand crèche facilities from their new bosses (contractors), too. “The parents are willing to work for a lesser wage if their kids are in a safe environment,” says Rawat, who has 25 years of experience working with slum kids.

And builders, too, gain. “The first and foremost benefit for a builder is legal compliance and consequent good reputation. Secondly, by providing crèches and daycare centres at their sites, they ensure that children are in a safe and protected environment,” explains Seema Sahai, Mobile Crèche’s COO.

The government-run anganwadis also have a key role to play in bringing marginalised kids into the system but awareness of the anganwadi system is low, particularly among labourers who come from other states. But, in July this year, over 200 crèches meant for children of migrant labourers, out of the 300 in the state, were shut down by the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), a community-based scheme run by the Union ministry of women and child development. In Gurugram, the ICDS closed down a total of 17 crèches in September 2017.

Again, last year alone, 1,521 students dropped out of government schools in the city, according to a study by NGO Humana People to People India (HPPI). In July 2016, the Haryana government, in collaboration with HPPI, launched ‘Kadam Step-Up Programme’, an initiative to draw more kids to school. According to Sumitra Yadav of HPPI, as of March 31 this year, ‘Kadam’ has reached out to around 8,200 out-of-school children, and has been instrumental in successfully mainstreaming 2,992 of these boys and girls into the formal education system.

But clearly, much more remains to be done to make sure that children of migrant workers are being taken care of. The education and labour departments, for instance, could jointly build and run creches.

TOI had reported in March that the Haryana government had collected Rs 399.46 crore in cess from Gurugram between 2010 and 2018, but spent only around 1% on the targeted beneficiaries — construction workers.