Women at work

Workplace creche mandate must be prioritised

The Union Ministry of Labour and Employment, in a recent written reply to Parliament, noted that it had conducted no dedicated assessment of mandatory workplace creches, and did not even maintain data on how many establishments were required to provide them or how many complied. Clearly, this is a worrying implementation gap. The provision introduced in 2017 required establishments with 50 or more workers to provide a creche. Nine years later, there is no data to suggest how widely the mandate is being followed. This matters because child care is not merely a welfare provision. It is part of the infrastructure that can enable women to enter, remain in, and progress in paid employment. The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data makes the issue more pressing. The female labour force participation rate (LFPR) fell to 33.2 per cent in April-June, from 34.7 per cent in the previous quarter. The urban female LFPR, at just 25 per cent, remains particularly low. The recent moderation should not be attributed to child care alone, since female participation is shaped by wages, availability of suitable jobs, social norms, education, mobility and other factors. But it reinforces the need to address the constraints that make sustained employment difficult for women.

 

One such constraint is the highly unequal distribution of unpaid care work. The “Time Use Survey” shows that women spend 236 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work for household members, while it is just 24 minutes for men. In fact, the 2025 PLFS Annual Report says that 44.4 per cent of women cited child care and personal commitments in homemaking as the main reason for not being in the labour force. This will need to change if India aspires to grow at higher rates. The women LFPR is much higher in other countries — it’s over 50 per cent in countries like the United States and China. Thus, the policy objective in India should be to make women’s participation in labour force more sustainable and productive. India’s demographic trajectory makes child care particularly relevant. Unlike many advanced economies, where declining fertility has been accompanied by a substantial postponement of motherhood, most births in India still occur to women in their 20s. This means the years in which women are establishing themselves in the labour market overlap with the period in which they are most likely to have young children. Affordable and accessible child care can consequently influence women’s ability to remain attached to employment after motherhood.

 

Workplace creches, however, cannot by themselves resolve India’s child care deficit. The 50-worker threshold leaves out a large part of India’s informal and small-enterprise workforce. A broader care-economy strategy, including shared and community facilities that can serve smaller establishments, is therefore necessary. A study by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has similarly argued for expanding child care services as part of a broader care economy. Thus, there is an immediate need to establish credible data on covered establishments, compliance and utilisation of creche facilities, and strengthen enforcement.