The preschool child, the state, and women’s social care in India, 1919–1975

This article traces the emergence of a distinct Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) policy from late colonial to early postcolonial India, culminating in the launch of the national Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme in 1975. In 1944, the Sargent Committee Report for the first time endorsed the state’s “duty” to look “after the physical and mental welfare of [its] future citizens from their earliest years”. The article argues that it was the national women’s movement, together with women-led educational and child welfare organisations, which put ECCE on the policy agenda. After independence, these organisations became essential partners in the provision and governance of ECCE in a framework of social care. Women’s civil society carved out a distinct space for female expertise and leadership in early childhood care, education, and development. This maternalistic strategy of claiming women’s responsibility for the nation’s poor children to some extent backfired – it furthered the outsourcing of ECCE provision to women’s voluntary associations and women’s volunteer labour. From the interwar period onwards, ECCE policy frameworks shifted from pre-primary education to child welfare, and finally to the all-round development of the young child as a key human capital resource. Devising strategies for ECCE expansion, policies targeted quantity over quality, a tendency heightened by the reliance on “honorary” paraprofessionals. Against the background of widespread poverty and malnutrition, ECCE came to prioritise health and nutrition over education, leaving the educational potential of the formative early childhood life-stage at the margins.