National Crèche Scheme: Supporting Working Mothers and Children

For millions of women across the country, the dream of earning a livelihood often collides with the reality of caring for a young child. Who will watch the baby while mom goes to work? For families without joint household support or the means to afford private daycare, this question can decide whether a woman works at all. The National Crèche Scheme was designed precisely to answer this question – offering safe, affordable day care for children of working mothers while giving them nutrition, health support, and early learning under one roof.

What the National Crèche Scheme is all about 🔗

The National Crèche Scheme is a government-backed programme that provides day care facilities to children aged six months to six years whose mothers are employed. Earlier known as the Rajiv Gandhi National Crèche Scheme, it was restructured as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme from 1 January 2017 and implemented through State and Union Territory governments under the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

Its purpose is straightforward but powerful. It enables women to take up or continue paid work without worrying about their child’s safety. At the same time, it addresses something larger – the holistic development of young children from families that cannot afford private crèches. The scheme targets children of women employed for at least fifteen days in a month or six months in a year, covering both rural and urban areas.

From RGNCS to Palna: a quick note on evolution 🔗

The scheme has gone through an important institutional change. In 2022, the erstwhile National Crèche Scheme was reorganised and renamed as the Palna Scheme under the Samarthya sub-component of Mission Shakti. Crèches that were running earlier were absorbed as Standalone Crèches, and a new category called Anganwadi-cum-Crèche (AWCC) was introduced. For the purposes of understanding the programme’s structure and intent, the objectives and operational logic remain rooted in the original National Crèche Scheme design.

Role of the Central Social Welfare Board and State partners 🔗

Implementation of the scheme does not sit with a single agency. It is a layered system involving the Central Social Welfare Board (CSWB), State Social Welfare Boards (SSWBs), and registered non-governmental organisations. The CSWB has historically played a central role as an umbrella body that entertains applications, approves agencies, and channels funds downward.

Implementing agencies and Mother NGOs forward applications to the Ministry through their State units, while the CSWB can also entertain applications directly from organisations of All India character before forwarding them to the Ministry. This dual pathway allows both grassroots NGOs and larger institutions to participate.

How the funding works 🔗

Money flows through a cost-sharing formula. The fund sharing pattern amongst the Centre, States/UTs and Non-Governmental Organisations is 60:30:10 for States, 80:10:10 for North Eastern and Himalayan States, and 90:0:10 for Union Territories. This graded pattern was designed to ensure that hilly and economically weaker regions receive disproportionate central assistance, since running crèches there is often more expensive and logistically harder.

Services offered at a crèche centre 🔗

Each crèche functions as a mini-ecosystem of child development. It is not merely a place where children are parked during the working day. The scheme provides an integrated package of services that touch nutrition, health, early learning, and emotional security.

Day care and sleeping facilities 🔗

The most visible service is reliable daytime supervision. Crèches remain open for 26 days a month and for seven and a half hours per day, with the number of children capped at 25 per crèche, supported by one worker and one helper. The eight-hour-style schedule is deliberately aligned with the working hours of most mothers, especially those in the unorganised sector.

Supplementary nutrition 🔗

Malnutrition remains one of the most persistent challenges in early childhood. The scheme addresses this with structured meals. Since a child stays almost the full working day at the crèche, three meals are provided – a morning snack or breakfast, a hot cooked lunch around noon, and an afternoon snack. The food provided must have adequate nutritional value as per government-prescribed guidelines under Mission Poshan 2.0, with variety across days and age-appropriate preparations for both babies and older children.

Health check-ups and immunization 🔗

Regular health monitoring is embedded into the daily routine. Every registered child is expected to be examined at least once a quarter by a registered medical practitioner or a doctor from a government hospital, and each centre must keep a First Aid and medicine kit for paediatric ailments. Crèche workers also coordinate with the nearest Primary Health Centre and Anganwadi for immunization, polio drops, and routine growth monitoring. Growth charts for boys and girls are maintained separately, following WHO child growth standards.

Early stimulation and pre-school education 🔗

The scheme distinguishes between two age groups for developmental activities. Children below three years receive early stimulation, while those in the 3-6 year bracket receive pre-school education. This is not formal academic schooling but age-appropriate play, songs, stories, and structured activities that prepare children for primary school and build their cognitive and social skills.

Who can open a crèche 🔗

Not any organisation can set up a crèche under the scheme. The rules are tight to keep quality high and prevent misuse.

The implementing organisation must be registered under the law, have a properly constituted Managing Body with clearly defined powers and duties, and must not work for the profit of any individual or body of individuals. Voluntary institutions, Mahila Mandals, and societies registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 with at least two years of prior service in child welfare are eligible to apply. State Governments can also implement the scheme directly, which has increasingly become the norm.

Who pays and how much 🔗

To build a sense of community ownership, user charges are collected from parents on a sliding scale. Families below the poverty line pay Rs 20 per child per month, while families with higher combined parental incomes pay more. These charges are symbolic rather than commercial – they signal parental commitment without turning the crèche into a private service.

Monitoring and quality control 🔗

A well-intentioned scheme can fall apart without monitoring. Recognising this, the National Crèche Scheme has multiple layers of oversight, from local inspections to independent third-party evaluation.

Norms for registration, establishment, and maintenance of crèches – covering hygiene, first-aid, breastfeeding, and nutrition – are stipulated under the scheme guidelines, and States are required to analyse the requirement of crèche services at the district level through survey and mapping of existing crèches. Monitoring happens through meetings and video conferences with State officials, field visits by Ministry officers, and third-party evaluation conducted by NITI Aayog.

Challenges on the ground 🔗

Despite its robust design, the scheme has faced real difficulties. The number of functional crèches declined from 18,040 in 2017-18 to 8,018 in 2018-19 and further to 6,458 in 2019-20. Between 2015 and 2020, more than 72% of functioning crèches shut down as per government data, and revised budget estimates were brought down sharply from earlier allocations. Delayed fund releases, poor utilisation, and inadequate infrastructure were repeatedly flagged. The NITI Aayog evaluation in 2020 recommended increasing coverage, plugging infrastructural gaps, training crèche workers better, and revising cost norms.

Why this scheme matters for social policy 🔗

A crèche scheme may look like a narrow welfare intervention, but it sits at the intersection of several big policy questions. It is a childcare policy, a women’s employment policy, a nutrition policy, and an early education policy all at once.

Women in the unorganised sector – construction workers, domestic helpers, agricultural labourers, small traders – rarely have access to maternity benefits or employer-provided crèches. For them, a neighbourhood crèche is often the difference between staying home and earning a wage. Crèches under the revamped framework operate 26 days a month for 7.5 hours, aligning with working mothers’ schedules, with each centre accommodating up to 25 children and ideally located within one kilometre of residential or workplace zones.

The scheme also complements other legal provisions. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act of 2017 made crèche facilities mandatory at every establishment with fifty or more employees, while the Factories Act of 1948 requires suitable rooms for children under six where more than 30 women are employed. The crèche scheme addresses the population these laws cannot reach – women outside formal employment.

The road ahead 🔗

With the transition into the Palna Scheme under Mission Shakti, the programme is moving toward convergence with Anganwadi infrastructure. As of February 2025, 1,761 Anganwadi-cum-Crèches are operational with 28,783 beneficiaries, alongside 1,284 Standalone Crèches serving 23,368 children, with the Ministry targeting 17,000 new AWCCs under the Palna Scheme in 2024-25. Whether this expansion translates into sustained quality will depend on training, honorariums for workers, timely fund flow, and local accountability – the same ingredients that determined success under the earlier design.

What do you think? Is integrating crèches with Anganwadi centres the most effective way to expand reliable childcare for working mothers, or does the country also need a parallel network of standalone crèches tailored to urban working women? And how much of the responsibility for child care should sit with the State versus employers in the organised and unorganised sectors?

References

1. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1606292
2. https://swd.kerala.gov.in/scheme-info.php?scheme_id=IDEyMA%3D%3D
3. https://www.pmfias.com/palna-programme/
4. https://www.indiafilings.com/learn/national-creche-scheme
5. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-news-analysis/national-creche-scheme-1
6. https://wcd.delhi.gov.in/sites/default/files/WCD/universal-tab/palna_scheme_under_mission_shakti.pdf
7. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1784149
8. https://www.shankariasparliament.com/current-affairs/creche-facilities-in-india
9. https://www.changeincontent.com/palna-scheme-under-mission-shakti/
10. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2119769