Invisible Threads, Indispensable Hands
- mudito
- Sep 23
- 2 min read
What keeps children in India fed, safe, and learning every day?
Not policy diagrams. Not programme budgets. But the invisible ledgers of care that caregivers improvise, hour by hour.
For six months, we stayed in conversation with 12 caregivers across India. We didn’t arrive once and depart with a case study. We returned again and again: phone calls on the way back from work, WhatsApp voice notes while stirring dal, video calls where kitchens and courtyards became the backdrop.
What emerged was not a neat data set but a textured ledger of trade-offs, hours
bargained, rupees redirected, dignity defended, joy carved out of scarcity.
The Four Ledgers of Care
Time was always fragile. Days bent around factory whistles, monsoon rains, and school timetables written for families that didn’t exist. A crèche closing an hour early could unravel an entire week.
Money was unforgiving. Every rupee was asked to do double duty: to buy rice, to buy safety, to buy back time. Free services were never free; hidden costs appeared in overtime lost, neighbours paid in chai money, uniforms that swallowed a week’s wages.
Dignity surfaced as the hidden currency. Carers tolerated scarcity, but humiliation tipped them out of systems altogether. A trans mother refusing schools that erased her identity. A father avoiding parent meetings where he was the only man in the room. Inclusion without dignity, they reminded us, is not inclusion.
Joy was never optional. A kulfi bought on a birthday, lullabies sung against hunger, a red shirt washed thrice for photo day. These small acts were not luxuries. They were survival strategies, keeping children, and carers themselves, afloat.
The Patterns We Saw
Rigidity vs. rhythm: Systems demanded predictability. Carers lived in constant recalibration.
Support before the system: Neighbours, cousins, siblings patched the cracks long before state services arrived.
Dignity as the breaking point: Scarcity was endured. Humiliation was not.
Joy as resilience: Love and delight were not add-ons but the infrastructure of care itself.
These were not edge cases. They were the system as lived.
Caregivers, in their improvisations, are already the true architects of care.
What We Ask
This report is not an archive. It is a provocation.
If time, money, dignity, and joy are the real currencies of care, then our systems must be redesigned with these ledgers in mind.
Care is not a side issue. It is the infrastructure beneath health, education, economy, democracy itself. And it is already breaking, not because carers are failing, but because systems refuse to bend with them.
The question is not whether we can support caring adults. They are already supporting us. The question is whether we are ready to build with them.
Download the full report below:
This piece is a part of Voices of Care, a Bachpan Manao CollabAction seeded by EkStep Foundation in 2024. It is an ongoing inquiry into the caregiving systems that shape childhood in India. By understanding what enables care to thrive, we uncover what allows children to flourish.
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