CARRIED: Everyday Care as the First Architecture of Childhood

Care is the invisible scaffolding of childhood in India.

It is not only found in classrooms, schemes, or service delivery, but in the everyday acts that keep children held: an elder keeping watch from a verandah, a neighbour stepping in during illness, a tuition teacher doubling as counsellor, a crèche improvised in a shaded corner of a worksite. Much of this labour does not show up in plans or budgets, yet it is the first and most enduring infrastructure a child encounters.

Despite this, care is often treated as incidental, a welfare add-on, a checkbox for compliance, rather than the very ground on which childhood stands.

When care is unseen, the people who provide it become invisible too.

Carried: Everyday Care as the First Architecture of Childhood begins from a different starting point: if care is infrastructure, what changes? What happens when the caregiver is recognised not as a “beneficiary,” but as a system in their own right?

Through stories gathered across cities, villages, worksites, and intergenerational homes, this report traces three threads: what is holding, what is fraying, and what is innovating in the gaps. It surfaces the unspoken design behind childhood: lullabies as emotional safety nets, courtyards as early learning spaces, peer-led crèches as social protection long before the state arrives.

This report aims to be a lens, one that widens how we understand systems, and who we count as part of them. It invites policymakers, practitioners, and the wider public to see care not as a private burden, but a public good that already exists in practice, waiting to be named and strengthened.

CARRIED - Everyday Care as the First Architecture of Childhood.

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