In India, one child is born almost every second….
and then?
... It's time to celebrate early childhood
to make the most of it
Think of your earliest childhood memories…
You smiled, didn’t you?
Childhood is filled with joy, wonder, excitement, and an unlimited appetite for life.
Children learn best from childhood itself. So, let’s join them in this celebration of growth and learning. It’s the ideal way to build a strong foundation for their future.
Visit the website for parents and other carers (in collaboration with 
)
)Missed Opportunity
Today, there is a lot of vulnerability and anxiety around early childhood, which can limit a child’s growth and learning journey to a severe extent.
Our education policies and frameworks have valuable recommendations to address this issue, but these need to be applied on-ground to make a real difference. Here are some opportunity areas that we can build on to make ‘Bachpan Manao’ a social mission.
The first eight years are a window of opportunity
Holistic development can be a lifelong advantage
An abundance of learning opportunities
Play is the way
Playground
A collection of resources, tools, articles and stories to help you celebrate childhood in real and diverse ways. Click on the categories below to explore further.
A leaking roof left Hoshiarpur Anganwadi Centre in Noida unsafe for a month, damaging wiring and walls. NalandaWay Foundation's intervention brought repairs, new furniture and paint — restoring a safe, joyful learning space for the Centre's 43 children.
Mastiwadi, by KhojGhar in Sukma, Chhattisgarh, reimagines Anganwadis as spaces of joyful, self-directed play. Its 15 locally-sourced installations include the Texture & Material Wall — a giant fish holding 34 tactile materials — turning everyday objects into sensory stories that connect children's play to their surrounding world.
A day-in-the-life account of Rita, an Anganwadi worker in Bhuj's Ward 8, showing how a job once dismissed as "2 kalak ni naukri" (a two-hour job) actually stretches across meals, health monitoring, digital app burdens, ration distribution hurdles, and unpaid dues — yet she stays for the children who keep her coming back.
A piece examining India's childhood screen-time crisis, where feeding-time device use displaces essential unstructured play. It highlights Bachpan Manao's non-shaming "Less Screen, More Play" pledge and its second-year "Bachpan is Gr8" framing, including PM Modi's recent remarks urging play over screens for children.
Screen time isn't the disease, it's the symptom. Deepika Mogilishetty traces what free play's disappearance from Indian childhoods really cost: unstructured hours, public play spaces, and present adults. Drawing on Bachpan Manao's Voices of Play data and evidence from Anganwadis to J-PAL trials, she argues play is infrastructure, not a soft add-on, and funding it is cheap.
Collabaction
Partners can champion this social mission by raising awareness and bringing about behaviour change through projects
and programs. We call this Collabaction – collaborating for action and impact.
