Who'll take care of Nanny's kids?

Some time ago, I found a group of domestic workers in my neighbourhood making plans for the summer. "Are you planning to take your children out this summer?" one of them asked Anita. "I'm going to see my children, not take them anywhere. They don't live with me anymore," she said. They were barely four and six years old, and lived with her sister in Mumbai, she said. It seemed odd, and the entire group of ladies wanted to know why. "In Delhi, I work from morning till evening as a nanny to two children. I was getting no time to look after my own," she said. Her sister in Mumbai was having similar issues with childcare. "And neither of us are well off enough to be able to give up earning to look after our kids," So they hit upon a solution. "We decided that I'd pay my sister Rs 2,000 a month to care for my kids as she does for her own. There's is a good government school near her house that they attend, and my sister gets an income sitting at home," said Anita.

This was an innovative solution, said one of the ladies in the groups, Meena. "When many of us migrate to Delhi to seek a living, we find getting childcare help most difficult," she said. Meena said she braves the summer heat to walk home every day at 1.00 pm (a two-km walk from her place of work) just to give her young daughter lunch when she returns from school. "Then I have no option but to leave the eight-year old to her own devices, and rush back to work. It tires me out, especially in this heat, but what is the option?" she said.

Were there no creches or Anganwadis near their homes, I asked. The women were bitter. "There are better childcare facilities in my village in Uttaranchal than there are in Delhi. In my village, there's a little Anganwadi, and no dearth of grannies and aunts to mind the children. But Delhi is so impersonal, nobody trusts their neighbours. And if I have to travel 10 km to drop and pick up my child from a creche, how will I get time to work?" said Anita.

The irony of it all was that most of the women in the group worked as nannies. "The world seems so sympathetic to educated women who work to satisfy their egos and justify their education," cribbed Anita. "But women like us work because we have no option. We get no place to leave our kids, no maternity leave and no sympathy either."

Could they think of any solutions, I asked. Anita said when her kids were staying with her, she had requested her employer to allow her to keep them with her in one corner of his house. "My husband had just deserted me, and there was nobody at all to look after the children who were way too young to be left alone. But my employer refused point blank."

Domestic employers, the general consensus was, were a strange breed who never thought about their staff. "The best thing would be for government schools to offer afternoon stay back options. Maybe our kids could even get extra tuition at that time," said Meena. Again, the consensus was that such dreams were rarely fulfiled. "I feel we must be invisible to the government and to our employers, that's why nobody is concerned with our problems," said Anita.

She had a point, I reflected later. I thought about how when people like us have young children, nannies are such an intrinsic part of our households - yet, so often, we haven't a clue who looks after their kids when they look after ours.