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Why toddlers are on a leash in Delhi -Amulya Gopalakrishnan
-The Times of India

Though laws mandate creches, daycare is like a dream for unorganized labourers.

A house is being built in Vasant Vihar, one of the many plots in the neighbourhood under construction. Men and wom en are hard at work. On the ground floor, two-year-old Jitin has been standing by a plastic can for a long, long time. A string around his ankle tethers him to a table.

"He could hurt himself if he was let loose," says his mother, Sakhi Lal.Jitin is tied up here for most of the working day , except when he is being fed, she says. "He's not the only one.All toddlers have to be leashed here, how else would we work?" Around the construction site, five or six children play with a rubber tube, minded by the oldest, 13-year-old Janaki.

The same scene plays out across small construction sites, where children hang about as their parents work. Despite laws with childcare provisions like the Contract Labour Act, the Building and Other Construction Workers Act and the Inter-State Migrants Act, children like Jitin have simply fallen through the welfare net. "Many labour law provisions apply to projects of a certain size and nature of work that employ a minimum number of women, not those with a scatter of female workers," says Raavi Birbal, who works on employment law. In any case, no woman worker at these projects appears to be aware of these entitlements.

There are many other laws that mandate creches, including the mines act, the factories act, the plantations act, the beedi and cigar workers act, and NREGA. But casual workers, the city's main service-providers like domestic workers and drivers, are left to their own meagre resources. "Every time there is a fire in a slum, children die because they are chained in their homes," says Enakshi Ganguly of the HAQ: Centre for Child Rights. Often, older children are made to take care of their siblings, their own needs interrupted.

Across India, babies and toddlers in poor families lose out on attention and stimulation. And never are they more desperately in need of competent adult care, explains Devika Singh of Mobile Creches, a pioneer in flexible daycare services. Early childhood -the period between birth to 6 years -lays the foundations of physical, emotional and cognitive abilities. The differences in early childhood environments are the seedbeds of future inequality, as Nobelwinning economist James Heckman has demonstrated.

Daycare is not only just about a child's capacity to thrive, but also a woman's equal right to work. "The labour ministry doesn't make family concerns a priority , it is framed as a woman-and-child matter. Why should the law depend on the number of women workers? Childcare should be a gender-neutral entitlement," says Sudeshna Sen of Mobile Creches.

The child and the state

Universal daycare, funded by the state, is a dream deferred in many countries.But India remains exceptional in terms of how neglected its children are, and how little it seems to care. According to the 2011 census, India has 158.7 million children under the age of 6, which makes about 16% of the population. In the period 2008-13, 43% of the children under 5 showed stunted growth.

Apart from what it requires of certain employers, the state operates the Rajiv Gandhi National Creche Scheme for Working Mothers for low-income families. It is too under-funded to be useful, with a monthly allotment of Rs 3,532 for an entire creche. "I run it out of my own home; there is no money for rent," says creche worker Shakuntala Tyagi, in Vinod Nagar, East Delhi. She makes Rs 1,200 a month looking after a roomful of toddlers every day . Kanti Devi, the official helper, makes Rs 800 a month.The creche is supported by the Indian Council of Child Welfare, the NGO that is entrusted with implementing the scheme. Still, Savita Singh, who does domestic work in five homes, says that leaving her kids, Sonu and Monu, at the creche is a great respite. "I work in two shifts, starting at 6 am and ending at 10 pm. I would have had no option but to take them with me to work."

The state's big gesture towards young children is the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and its anganwadi network of over 12.6 lakh centres. Large-scale as the programme is, the "anganwadis are not more than feeding centres" right now, says Ganguly . "There is very little by way of training or funds to the anganwadi volunteers, and so it serves less than half of the population it is meant to," says Singh. The 12th Plan recommended making 70,000 of these over into anganwadis-cum-creches, but they are yet to materialize. "The heavy reduction in ICDS funding is very worrying," says Savitri Ray , convener of the Forum for Creche and Childcare Services (Forces), a network of NGOs that works for women in the informal sector.

The fundamental problem, says Singh, is that there is no recognition of the rights of young children. The under-sixes are excluded from the Right to Education Act. In 2013, the Centre launched an Early Childhood Care and Education Policy (ECCE), full of fine intention, but not legally binding. In its 259th report submitted last month, the Law Commission strongly recommended a right to creche and daycare services.

"We need a basic, well-supervised daycare service in all communities and neighbourhoods, as they do in other parts of the world," says Ganguly . The problem is not lack of money, but the fact that childcare is a low policy priority . The state could catalyse communities and neighbourhoods to institute daycare, or subsidise such services for low-income families. A Forces survey on panchayats in 2013-14 even found that the majority of women were willing to pay for such arrangements. "In the case of construction workers, the cess meant for their welfare remains largely unspent, and can easily be directed towards childcare," says Singh.

Investing in early childhood pays for itself many times over. If the sight of a toddler chained in place doesn't move policymakers, perhaps this pragmatic calculation should.