In a room measuring ten feet by ten feet in Delhi's Jahangirpuri, a boy who had not begun to speak started forming words. Both his parents were deaf and could not speak, and it had been assumed the boy could not either. At the creche built into that room, a mirror had been fixed at his eye level. Each day he watched himself and the other children shape sounds, copying the movement of their mouths. Over weeks, the words came. He was not deaf. Something in his home had kept him silent, and the room drew him out.
That mirror cost almost nothing. This is the case architect Swati Janu made at a recent Bachpan Manao masterclass: The spaces we build for our youngest children shape how they learn, and even a modest room can be turned into a place that helps a child grow.
Anganwadis are the country's front line for early childhood. India runs well over a million of them under the Integrated Child Development Services, the programme launched in 1975 that reaches children in the years before school across cities, villages and everywhere between. Janu, founder of the Social Design Collaborative, has spent years working out how to make these spaces serve the children inside them, often on budgets that leave no room for waste.
Her method starts with height. Most rooms are built for adults. Janu designs at two levels, one for grown-ups and one below three feet, the world as a young child actually meets it. At that lower level go bookshelves with picture books facing outward so children choose their own reading, blackboards they can draw on, pin boards where their artwork goes up. A litre of blackboard paint costs a few hundred rupees and turns any wall into a surface for a child's first letters. Beaded grills, known as Bala elements and developed by Kabir Vajpayee's organisation Vinyasa, double as safety doors and counting frames. Tactile boards made from fur, grass and scrap material can be swapped on embroidery hoops as they wear.
{{/usCountry}}Her method starts with height. Most rooms are built for adults. Janu designs at two levels, one for grown-ups and one below three feet, the world as a young child actually meets it. At that lower level go bookshelves with picture books facing outward so children choose their own reading, blackboards they can draw on, pin boards where their artwork goes up. A litre of blackboard paint costs a few hundred rupees and turns any wall into a surface for a child's first letters. Beaded grills, known as Bala elements and developed by Kabir Vajpayee's organisation Vinyasa, double as safety doors and counting frames. Tactile boards made from fur, grass and scrap material can be swapped on embroidery hoops as they wear.
{{/usCountry}}None of this needs expensive infrastructure. Janu is firm that children learn best sitting and playing on the ground, that a good mat often beats costly furniture, and that a room should also hold a calmer, less cluttered corner where a neurodivergent child can step back when the space becomes too stimulating.
The harder problem is building at all inside government systems. Janu is candid about the delays, the permissions, the bureaucratic lethargy. Her answer is to find a champion within the system, an officer who shares the vision and carries it forward. In Uttar Pradesh, her studio designed a modular octagonal Anganwadi with a local NGO and the Women and Child Development Department. Because permanent structures are slow to approve, it was built to be dismantled, made earthquake and water resistant, and given generous windows and storage. The inauguration itself became a tool. The district magistrate invited CSR companies, and within six months an agreement was signed to replicate the design at 20 locations, 10 funded by HCL and ten by Rotary Club.
The constraints can be sharper still. Along the river in Delhi, farming families facing eviction had no early childhood centre at all. Janu's team built one from bamboo, river weed for insulation and recycled wood, raised against floods that now come every year. It runs on solar power, with a fan in every classroom, and it went up in a matter of weeks.
Some of her most telling work is in rural Bihar, where the NGO Seva is training women to run creches from their own homes, with a target of a 150 across the districts of Gaya and Katihar. Rather than hand them a blueprint, Janu's studio made a fold-out booklet of nine steps and let the women plan their own spaces, tracing shapes and marking corners. Watching them build kitchens and shelves in mud and bamboo, she concluded they were already architects.
For any of this to matter, ideas like Janu's have to travel. They have to become real in every neighbourhood and community in the country, not stay confined to pilots. A well-designed anganwadi within walking distance of home does more than shift a child's path of learning and growth. It can become a safe and joyful space where mothers find one another, and where fathers, too, take part in their children's earliest years.
This is the promise anganwadis hold. They are the institution the country has placed closest to its youngest citizens, and thought spent on them travels a long way. Design alone cannot do it; teacher training, pedagogy and partnership matter as much, and Janu is the first to say so. But when a mirror can unlock a child's voice and a few hundred rupees can turn a wall into a classroom, the direction is clear. Give these rooms real care, and they can give every child the childhood they are promised.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Deepika Mogilishetty, chief, policy and partnerships, EkStep Foundation.