Why Childcare Is Becoming a Workplace Priority In India
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Twenty-two years ago, Swati Jain went looking for a good preschool for her child and couldn’t find one. What she built instead has looked after more than 20,000 children — and changed how some of India’s biggest companies think about keeping women at work. There is a moment that hundreds of thousands of Indian mothers know without anyone having to describe it. Maternity leave is ending. The baby is still very young — maybe three months, maybe six. The phone calls from HR have started. And the woman sitting at home, who was good at her job and wants to go back to it, is trying to figure out how to hand her child to someone else for eight, ten, twelve hours a day without falling apart.
Swati Jain has spent twenty-two years thinking about that moment. Not in a policy document or a think-tank report, but in the practical, daily business of running childcare centres inside hospitals, corporate campuses, government offices, and airline headquarters — places where the working day does not end at five and nobody’s schedule looks the same from one week to the next.
She is the Managing Director of The Banyan, a preschool and corporate daycare brand that has grown from a single centre in 2003 to partnerships with over a hundred companies, with plans to cross two hundred centres across India. The numbers are notable. But the thing Jain talks about most readily is not the scale — it is the gap that made the scale necessary in the first place.
How it started
The Banyan was not born from a business plan. It was born from a search. In 2003, Jain was expecting her second daughter and looking for a preschool — not just a place that would keep a child safe and occupied, but one built around experiential learning, curiosity, and the kind of early childhood development that research had been pointing toward for years. What she found was a market that hadn’t caught up. The options available were either traditional and rote-driven or simply too far removed from what she and other parents around her were looking for. “We found very few options that reflected this philosophy,” she says. “There was a clear gap between what modern parents were looking for and what was available.”
Around the same time, she was watching something else happen — something that had nothing to do with curriculum and everything to do with the workforce. Talented, qualified women were disappearing from their careers, not because they wanted to, but because the support systems that would have allowed them to stay simply did not exist. “This wasn’t a question of ambition or capability,” she says. “These women wanted to work, contribute, and grow professionally. But there was very little infrastructure to support them.” Those two observations — the gap in early childhood education and the gap in working parent support — were, she realised, the same gap. She decided to fill it.
The nine-to-five myth
One of the things Jain pushes back on most directly is the assumption that builds itself into most discussions about workplace childcare: that the working parent needing support is someone who arrives at an office at nine and leaves at five, in a city with reliable transport, with a partner who shares the load. The parents The Banyan actually works with look very different. A nurse coming off a night shift. A pilot navigating a back-to-back roster. A hotel manager working straight through a weekend. These are people whose schedules don’t just vary — they are structurally incompatible with most conventional childcare arrangements, which close at six and charge extra if you’re late. “Childcare cannot be one-size-fits-all,” Jain says. “It has to reflect how people actually live and work.”
Building around that reality has meant working closely with employers to understand shift patterns, designing extended-hour support where the job demands it, and maintaining the kind of consistency in routine for children that their parents’ schedules simply cannot provide at home during certain stretches. The child’s day stays predictable even when the parent’s day is not. That, she says, is part of the actual product — not just a nice detail.
The boardroom conversation
For years, when Jain walked into a company to pitch corporate childcare, she was walking into a conversation about perks. Childcare sat alongside gym memberships and sabbatical policies — things a company offered if it had the budget and the inclination, not things it considered fundamental to how the business ran. That framing, she argues, is precisely what has made the problem so persistent. “When organizations lose experienced women employees because childcare challenges become overwhelming, they lose institutional knowledge, leadership potential, and the investment they have already made in developing talent,” she says. “Replacing skilled employees is significantly more expensive than retaining them.”
The statistic she returns to is one that should make any HR leader uncomfortable: nearly half of women employees in India leave the workforce within months of returning from maternity leave. Not because they planned to. Not because they wanted to. Because the return became unmanageable without support, and the organisation had not thought to provide any. “When viewed through that lens,” she says, “childcare stops being a perk and becomes part of workforce infrastructure.”
The most forward-looking companies, she has found, have already made this calculation themselves. The ones still treating it as optional are, in her view, going to feel the consequences of that decision in their retention numbers and their gender diversity figures over the next few years.
The cost nobody calculates
Ask Jain what it actually costs a woman — and the broader economy — when childcare support isn’t there, and she does not reach for vague generalities. She gets specific. For the individual woman, a career break triggered by childcare unavailability rarely stays small. It compounds. Lost income in the years she’s away. Slower progression when she returns, if she returns at the same level at all. Reduced leadership opportunities during what should have been the most productive decade of her career. Lower retirement savings that follow her for the rest of her life. “Many women who take career breaks also face challenges re-entering the workforce at the same level,” she says. The break that felt temporary rarely turns out to be.
For the economy, the scale of what is being lost is harder to put a number on but not hard to see. India has one of the world’s largest pools of educated female talent. The workforce participation rate among women remains, by any measure, well below what it should be given that talent base. And a meaningful portion of that gap can be traced, directly or indirectly, to the absence of childcare support at critical career junctures. “Supporting childcare is not only a social issue,” Jain says. “It is an economic imperative.”
What scaling actually means
The Banyan’s ambition — to grow past two hundred centres across India — is the kind of number that looks clean on a slide deck and complicated in practice. Jain is candid about where the difficulty actually lives. Opening a new centre is the visible part. The invisible part — and, she says, the harder part — is keeping every centre exactly as good as the last one. When a parent puts their child into The Banyan’s care, they are not making a transactional decision. They are making a trust decision. And trust, unlike a floor plan, does not replicate automatically.
“Childcare is deeply human work,” she says. “Scaling while preserving trust, warmth, and individual attention is perhaps the biggest challenge and responsibility that comes with growth.” That has meant investing heavily in training, in quality monitoring systems, in the culture and leadership structures that hold consistency together as the organisation gets larger. The parts of that investment that don’t show up on a brochure are, she suggests, the parts that matter most.
Where the next fight is
Two decades in, Jain is more optimistic than she might reasonably be, and she knows it. There is more awareness now than there was in 2003 — among employers, among policymakers, among the employees themselves, particularly the younger ones who are entering parenthood with a clearer sense of what they are willing to accept and what they are not. “Today’s workforce evaluates employers differently than previous generations did,” she says. “Employees are looking for organisations that support them not just professionally, but across major life stages.”
That generational shift is real and measurable. Millennials and Gen Z parents are not making the same quiet compromises their parents made. They are asking the childcare question before they join a company and asking it again when a competitor comes calling. The organisations that have already built the infrastructure are finding it easier to recruit and keep good people. The ones that haven’t are beginning to feel the gap.
But Jain is clear-eyed about where the problem still sits. Corporate childcare in India, even at its most progressive, remains largely the province of large companies in major cities. The millions of working parents in smaller organisations, in tier-two and tier-three cities, in sectors that have never had this conversation — they remain, for now, outside the reach of what has been built. “The next phase of growth will require wider adoption, greater innovation, stronger public-private collaboration, and a recognition that childcare is essential infrastructure for a modern economy,” she says.
The five-minute message she would deliver to every HR head in India, if she could, is the same one she has been delivering for over two decades — just to a smaller room each time. Childcare is not a benefit. It is not a perk. It is not something you add to an offer letter to make it look more attractive. It is talent retention infrastructure. And the companies that understand that first will not have to explain it to the ones that don’t — because the numbers will do that for them.
