Employing more women as early anganwadi educators

Meet Radha, an anganwadi worker whose days are a whirlwind of care and community service. With nearly 14 lakh centres across the country providing essential services like nutrition, education, health monitoring, immunisation, and counselling, there's a growing need to enhance these efforts with additional educators in each centre, ensuring comprehensive early childhood care and education. Small-scale time-use studies from Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh suggest that anganwadi workers are only able to spend an average of 30 to 90 minutes on preschool education, less than the minimum two hours of daily time prescribed by the National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development. Additionally, with approximately 900,000 anganwadi centres nationwide where the pupil-teacher ratio exceeds 1:20, there is a pressing need for additional staffing to achieve a reasonable ratio of one educator for every 20 children per centre. This seems like a sizable investment, but from a job creation standpoint employing local community educators at anganwadi centres offers employment with wages above market rates, non-inflationary impact, and local respect.