Be careful with daycare centres

Pushpa Girimaji

Reports about serious injuries caused to children at daycare centres in different cities-Mumbai and Gurugram for example- have got me worried, because I leave my child in a daycare centre when I go to work. What kind of precautions should I take to ensure the safety of my child?

First and foremost, check their track record. Talk to parents who are leaving their children there and find out if they are happy with the service. Next, visit the centre and see the facilities, hygiene and the qualifications of those who are looking after the children. Is there enough number of them? How do they deal with the children? What kind of educational background do they have? How safety conscious are they? Has the centre done a background check on them? Make a list of questions and get satisfactory answers. 

Last month, a nine-month old baby’s ring finger was severed at an expensive daycare centre in Gurugram, Haryana, where the child’s working parents had left the baby for the day. The Centre’s explanation was that the child’s finger got accidentally caught in the door of the diaper changing room. But how can that happen if the child had been properly taken care of? Not surprisingly, the Centre did not show the CCTV footage to the parents, claiming that it had accidentally got unplugged and so there was no footage! In April last year, a three year old girl’s thumb was amputated, following a severe injury at another expensive Centre, also in Gurugram. Here too, it was claimed that the girl’s hand had got caught in the gap between the door hinges and the frame! Again in November last year, the entire nation was shocked by a brutal assault on a nine-month old baby by a help at a daycare centre in Khargar, near Mumbai. 

So you must also make sure that the daycare centre has a CCTV in every room and that it is working. There should be a provision for online monitoring by parents. Of course, it would not be possible for parents to constantly watch the child from their workplace, but the fear that they are watching will certainly force these centres to pay more attention to the quality and safety of care. One generally hopes that there will never be such incidents at any of these places, affecting the safety of the child, but in case of an untoward incident, make sure that the centre pays for its negligence — through a criminal case filed through the police and a case for compensation filed through the consumer court.

Is there any law regulating these centres?

Unfortunately, there is no law, but we do urgently need one to regulate them. The law should include standards for building and equipment, hygiene and sanitation, kitchen and food, qualification and training of care givers, stipulate the ratio of children and care givers, standardise safety practices to be followed like background checks, including the health of those who work at the centres and the requirement of licensing and registration of every crèche or daycare centre, on their fulfilling all these standard requirements. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (or even the State Commission) should take up this issue and draft a model law that can be adopted by all the states. The main focus of the law should be to eliminate unintentional injuries and ensure the safety of children who are left in the care of such centres by working parents. 

Many countries around the world have such laws governing these centres. In Australia, for example, the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority monitors the implementation of the National Quality Framework (NQF) across Australia. The NQF includes a national law, regulations, quality standards and operational requirements, besides a national body to monitor grant of approvals, assess and rate the quality of service and enforce compliance of legislation. 

 In India, as the number of working women increases and so also nuclear families, the demand for daycare centres to look after children, till they start going to school, will only increase in the coming years. So will accidents caused by careless negligence at these centres, unless efforts are made now to regulate these services and protect small children.