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The invaluable investment India must capitalize on
This article is authored by Prof Geeta Chopra, University of Delhi (retd.) and founder, Equal Childhoods.
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India has begun to say the right things about early childhood. Earlier this year, the ministry of women and child development called Early Childhood Care and Education a “foundational pillar” of Viksit Bharat @2047. But our budgets still tell a different story.
India spends less than 0.1% of its GDP on early childhood care and education. In this restricted budget, the country continues to offer poor quality early childcare, losing millions of under five children to compromised developmental potential from poverty and stunting. As India targets a $5 trillion economy, its most critical infrastructure gap is not physical or digital. It is human capital. And human capital is built, or lost, in the first 1,000 days of life.
This is not a moral argument dressed up as an economic one. It is an economic argument, full stop. Let’s examine it.
Globally, The Lancet estimates that 43% of children under five in low- and middle-income countries, and as high as 65% in South Asia, face compromised developmental potential due to extreme poverty and stunting. The same research found that countries forfeit up to twice their current health budgets by failing to invest in early childhood development. Given its demographic scale, India carries the largest absolute share of it, simply by population size.
Economic modeling consistently shows that early intervention outperforms every later-stage investment in education or training. Nobel Laureate James Heckman's analysis of comprehensive birth-to-five programmes for disadvantaged children found a 13% annual rate of return, realised through higher adult earnings, increased tax contributions, reduced health care costs, and lower rates of criminal justice involvement. No investment India makes in a child after age five will match what it can earn by investing when the child is under age five.
The long-term global data bears this out clearly. A 30-year follow-up study in Jamaica found that stunted toddlers who received early psychosocial stimulation earned 37% more as adults than toddlers who did not, closing the earnings gap with their non-stunted peers entirely. A 2025 cost-benefit analysis of Vietnam's community-based Learning Clubs found a benefit-cost ratio of 5.5 to 1: $ 5.5 returned for every $ 1 spent, driven by the lifetime wage gains of improved child cognitive development alone.
Early care also functions as an immediate multiplier, not just a long-term one. McKinsey Global Institute projected that closing India's gender labour gap could add $770 billion to GDP by 2025, a target year that has now passed with the gap largely intact. The reason is not mysterious: Reliable, regulated childcare is the single most critical precondition for women to remain in and return to the formal workforce. Without it, skilled female labour keeps draining out of the economy, and the opportunity keeps getting pushed further out.
As automation reshapes what the labour market rewards, cognitive flexibility, executive function, and the ability to adapt will matter more than rote skill. These capacities are built before a child ever enters a classroom. A country that under-invests in early care is not just failing children today; it is under-preparing the future workforce required to drive economic growth.
The evidence leaves no room for ambiguity. Early childhood care is neither discretionary, nor a ‘nice to have’. It is high-yield economic infrastructure that needs to be nurtured.
First, India must begin treating early childhood expenditure as a direct investment in human capital within its fiscal priority-setting, moving away from viewing it as residual welfare spending. Second, the country needs binding institutional guidelines for who is allowed to deliver private and public early childhood services, hence requiring certified and trained professionals across all settings. With over 14 lakh operational anganwadi centres nationwide and more than 10.5 lakh anganwadi workers having already completed initial early childhood education training for the services run under ICDS by ministry of women and child development, the foundation is set to formally transition this public workforce into a professional cadre with compensation and career structures to match.
Equally urgent is the rapid expansion of private ECCE delivery, which currently operates without uniform standards and desperately requires strict national regulation, quality curriculum benchmarks, and mandatory certification to ensure best developmental outcomes. Finally, quality early care must become a guaranteed public entitlement scaled with the same urgency and budget discipline currently reserved for physical infrastructure.
If early childhood care is truly a foundational pillar of Viksit Bharat @2047, that commitment must finally be reflected in our national fiscal architecture. The choice is not whether to pay for early childhood; it is whether to pay now to build human capital, or pay for its absence later at twice the price.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Prof Geeta Chopra, University of Delhi (retd.) and founder, Equal Childhoods.
