Seema Kumar
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Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao is actually to acknowledge and recognise that there is an abundance in childhood, like no other stage of life, and parents and caregivers can do a lot for their children by recognising and celebrating this abundance
In a world obsessed with achievement, EkStep Foundation’s Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao mission is a refreshing call to action. It urges parents and caregivers to prioritise the joy and exploration of childhood, recognising its immense value for a child’s holistic development.
There is a very vivid memory of my childhood that I would like to share. We used to have a rice sieve which my mother used when she cooked rice. Once the rice was cooked, she would pour the entire thing into the sieve to remove the excess water and once the water was sieved completely, the rice was ready to eat. This served a dual purpose, one you could remove excess water from the cooked rice without difficulty and two the rice water could be used as starch for clothes. But what I remember from this time is my excitement when my mother would hand over the washed and dried sieve to me with a matchstick and I would sit with my legs spread out and clean the holes in the sieve with the matchstick. Another memory is of my mother telling me how I would sit on the floor with her while she cut vegetables or worked in the kitchen and went through pictorial books and was perfectly happy doing so.
There is more but then that’s a long story for another day. The point I am trying to make here is that childhood is for fun and joy. It needs to be enjoyed. Not burdened with the pressures of doing well or looking good.
In the first eight years of a child’s life, a child needs to be a child. Enjoy life’s joys, explore and learn from one’s own joyful experiences. All this lays the foundation for a better future both mentally and physically.
EkStep Foundation’s Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao is a mission to celebrate the growth and learning opportunities for every child in their first eight years through joy, care and responsibility. Rohini Nilekani, a committed philanthropist, is the Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Co-founder and Director of EkStep Foundation, a non-profit education platform. Rohini is and has been named ‘the most generous woman in India’ for the third consecutive time in 2022 by the Hurun India Philanthropy Report. In 2017, she signed the Giving Pledge with her husband Nandan Nilekani, which commits half their wealth to philanthropic causes.
Bachpan Manao brings together a network of more than 80 organisations committed to addressing the growth, and well-being of India’s youngest. The mission aims at raising the level of conversation for the sake of every 0-8-year-old child in India, on fostering the holistic development of children, amplifying the critical role of play in growth and learning as well as the importance of enabling the right environment and experiences to nurture inherent abilities of the young body and mind.
As part of this endeavour, the initiative has launched a short film, Celebrate Childhood, Keep Growing that captures the simple joys of childhood, highlighting moments when children learn and thrive. It encourages parents and teachers to prioritise the holistic development of children during these crucial early years, emphasising the power of exploration and play in strengthening foundational learning.
In an interview with The Mind Diaries, Deepika Mogilishetty talks about Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao and how it is important to let children enjoy the first years of their childhood for their holistic growth, mentally and physically.
Deepika Mogilishetty is Chief of Policy and Partnerships and part of the leadership team at EkStep Foundation since its inception in 2015. At EkStep she leads the foundation’s work on early years leveraging the power of networks and narratives to bring focus and attention to the growth and development of children in the early years through the Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao mission initiative. She is also involved in diverse projects associated with the creation and adoption of digital public goods and digital public infrastructure.
Inclusion and access has underpinned all of her work for over two decades. She has led initiatives, and also worked with government, and not for profit organisations (Indian and international) in areas of public policy, human rights, justice and social change across India. She has a B.A., LLB (Hons) degree from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She was part of the start-up team at AADHAAR in 2009 and the Law and Policy Advisor of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). She led a programme on ‘access to justice for women’ as the India Head of ‘Global Rights – Partners for Justice’, an international human rights organisation. She led the policy advocacy efforts for a law on ‘access to information in India’ at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi. She currently lives and works in Bangalore. She is an accomplice in the upbringing of two teenage girls and two rescued dogs and refuses to start the day without a proper strong cup of South Indian filter coffee.
Excerpts of the interview:
What is EkStep Foundation?
EkStep Foundation is a philanthropic organisation with a mission of digital transformation at the population scale and in this regard has funded, supported and encouraged many initiatives which align with the intent to enable digital transformation at scale, in the interest of inclusion, equity, development and empowerment of people. EkStep has developed Sunbird (www.sunbird.org), which is a set of configurable, extendable, modular building blocks for learning and human development designed to create diverse platforms and solutions to suit various use-cases, contexts and needs. Sunbird Building Blocks are open-sourced under MIT license and are globally recognised as digital public goods.
EkStep engages with a wide ecosystem to create public goods, open-source technologies, and research. EkStep’s work spans education, language, and AI/ML technologies. Initiatives like Machine Translation, Optical Character Recognition, Natural Language Processing, and Speech Recognition are all part of our open-source contributions.
EkStep has seeded an initiative called Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao in 2023, and has been growing it with 100+ collab+actors (collaboration in action). Bachpan Manao aims to empower caring adults to see and engage with the abundance of learning opportunities in every child’s first 400 weeks. You can find more details at: https://bachpanmanao.org/
Who thought about Bachpan Manao… and why? Is there a personal story behind this?
What are our imagination and aspirations for our youngest children? We all know that children go to school at the age of 6. School means learning and education and the path to a fulfilling adult life. But do we as adults pause to think about how children learn and grow in different stages of their childhood?
In India, 25 million children are born every year. The first 400 weeks of each of these children can be different and more meaningful than the previous generation experienced. Focus on childhood, and especially early childhood, is a single big differentiator for assured future holistic growth and to ensure their full potential. Extensive research and longitudinal studies in early childhood have shown this. This begs the question – what should India’s approach be for the first 400 weeks of every child? This quest leads us to explore conversations across a wide range of individuals across the country – experts in early childhood, mothers, fathers, preschool educators, anganwadi workers along with several organisations working in this domain, providing services in this domain across urban, semi-urban and rural India, as well as researchers and professionals in the communication and marketing field.
Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao was co-created, and the idea emerged through deep dialogues, insighting workshops. This articulation simply was a message to every caring adult “let’s celebrate childhood and keep growing”. The narrative came from combining what we have learnt about the science of the early years with engaging in the deep dialogues. The teams engaged with questions like “are we in a hurry to turn children into students?” especially when science tells us that the child in this age group engages with the world with innate curiosity and every living moment is a learning moment for the child.
On the other hand, what emerges as the mental model of adults is the joy of children and childhood but also anxiety and a mental model of scarcity, so what emerged was that early childhood (0-8 years) is burdened with vulnerability, stress and anxiety, which is detrimental to the child’s growth and learning potential. Parents and caregivers are caught in the anxiety of their children being left behind, and there is increased pressure and competition to do well in school or be school-ready in a very specific way. Bachpan Manao seeks to shift this approach to early childhood to that of joy and abundance, where we as a country are able to see the unique window of opportunity for holistic growth and learning in the first 400 weeks of every child’s life. Hence the idea: Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao. Celebrate Childhood, Keep Growing. (You can find more details at: https://bachpanmanao.org/about-the-mission/)
You have 100 organisations working with you on this project so that’s a huge number but my question here is, this is India where most parents baulk at the idea of leaving their young children to keep themselves busy. They do like to know what their children are doing so how difficult do you find it to connect with the parents without sounding patronising or giving gyaan?
The way to see Bachpan Manao is not as a project with 100+ organisations but as an idea that these organisations and individuals in these organisations connect with. The idea is simple – the childhood phase is a unique window of opportunity. With the right environment and engagement, every child can be assured of a holistic childhood experience, which is essential to build foundational life skills. And play is a way to do it. Incorporating play and making space for all kinds of play in a child’s life is an essential ingredient of celebrating childhood and to keep growing.
There are many organisations in the Bachpan Manao collabactor ecosystem engaging with parents in different ways. Pratham Education Foundation in their early years programme has created thousands of mothers groups across the country. Mothers come together to learn different games they can play with their children and they do this as a community as well. Rocket Learning has an extensive programme, which is WhatsApp based with periodic nudges and activities being sent to parents to do with their children. Key Education Foundation has a solution for parent engagement with worksheet-based activities and even advice and ideas to deal with different challenges parents face. Dost Education’s voice messages on responsive parenting are popular and effective in rural communities. Pre-schools such as Papagoya, Creative Kids and Nurturant among several others live the play-based pedagogy and make community and parent engagement an integral part of their engagement with children. These are just a snapshot of organisations and there are many that are transforming anganwadi’s such as Gyan Prakash Foundation, Makkala Jagriti and Centre for Learning
Resources and others focussing on balvatikas such as Language and Learning Foundation among several others.
The Better India has a micro-site called Childhood Dialogues, which captures many stories, messages and content associated with childhood and early years.
India needs to start a conversation on what it means to create, design, imbibe the idea of enabling time and spaces for children and childhood to grow. Celebrating childhood is an idea and imagination in this direction – pause, reflect, engage, talk, play. The choice is between seeing children and even childhood as clay that needs to be moulded to one’s vision vs. a seed that is planted with a nurturing environment and ecosystem being created and enabled.
The message of Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao is actually to acknowledge and recognise that there is an abundance in childhood, like no other stage of life, and parents and caregivers can do a lot for their children by recognising and celebrating this abundance. Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao sees free and unstructured play as a powerful exercise for children to engage in because it has so many benefits. In today’s day and age, where parents could feel the pressures of not doing enough for their children, it is for the well-being of both parents and children to recognise that free play is not a waste of time. It, in fact, fosters creativity, language, motor development, etc. to name a few.
Especially in today’s extremely competitive educational world where parents are looking at their children to do better than almost everyone, even their own parents. The higher the expectations the higher the pressure.
The simple answer to this question: whether you see the world as competitive or see that the child needs to build the foundational innate skills to navigate an ever-changing world is this, create and participate in making an optimum childhood experience. This will build the foundation for the child’s own future. As one of the insights from our deep dialogue conversations pointed out, “A child is not an adult in progress”.
For instance, it is incredibly surprising what children learn when children from a young age engage in activities of daily living; they are building the foundational building blocks that will sustain them in future life.
It is the aspiration of every parent (this has emerged in research from across socio-economic backgrounds) that they want a better life and experience for their child than the one they had. The aspiration to build the skills for future life rests in making the most of early childhood by giving in to the window of opportunity where the child is exploring, engaging and making space for their own view of the immediate environment around them. As our national education policy and curriculum framework also states: play is how children learn and build skills for a strong future.
How do early childhood experiences impact lifelong learning and well-being?
Early childhood experiences hugely impact lifelong learning and well-being.
The first eight years are a critical window of opportunity for learning and development. Scientific research identifies ‘sensitive periods’ for the development of language, socio-emotional, psychomotor, and analytical skills. Over 85 per cent of brain development occurs by age six, with the brain’s plasticity strongest during these years. A well-rounded early childhood has immense benefits, while poor early childhood experience can cause developmental gaps.
India’s education policy says that the early years need to be charged with holistic development – physical, socio-emotional, language, cognitive, and creative. WHO’s 2020 guidelines emphasise responsive caregiving, which involves noticing, understanding, and responding to a child’s needs timely and appropriate. These ‘serve and return’ interactions, where adults respond to children’s cues, are essential for brain development and well-being.
How does play, rather than free play allow children to grow – both in knowledge and experience?
Free play is a treasure trove for childhood development, nurturing language, emotional, social, and cognitive skills. Picture a child standing outdoors on a rock or atop a slide imagining it as a pirate ship. As they narrate their adventure, their vocabulary expands, and narrative skills flourish. Sharing this adventure with friends teaches negotiation and empathy, while disagreements over roles enhance emotional regulation and problem-solving.
In another scene, children build a fort with cushions, and use the wheel of a sewing machine as the steering wheel of a car. They plan, organise, and adapt their designs, boosting executive function and critical thinking. Outdoors, climbing trees or exploring nature strengthens physical abilities and enhances spatial awareness and risk assessment.
Through these playful escapades, children don’t just have fun, they learn to express themselves, navigate social landscapes, and think creatively. Free play is the unsung hero of childhood, where every game is a lesson, and every story is a step toward holistic development. The National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage (2022) also recognises and emphasises the importance of free or non-structured play, along with guided and structured play.
What do you mean by play? How does it help in healthy development?
Play isn’t just games or sports, it’s the idiom children naturally use to be, do and relate with the world and their own selves. Play is a natural way for children to learn and grow. Though children do not play for healthy development, when they play it leads to healthy development.
Play includes conversations, storytelling, toys, songs and rhymes, music and movement, art and craft, indoor and outdoor games, and spending time in nature. There are different types of play. Free play is child-led, with adults only observing. Guided play is child-led, with adult support and facilitation. Structured play is adult-led, with planned activities. Children should be encouraged in all types of play for healthy development.
How does play help in healthy development? Let’s take one of the first games one plays with a child in every culture: peek-a-boo. It makes you smile, and the child laugh. A simple act of hiding your face and revealing it creates a joyful bonding moment. But the other side of this magic is that it is teaching a child that a thing that cannot be seen exists – object permanence. This is one example of how play helps in the child’s learning and healthy development.
We play instinctively and as the child grows, we need to make more space and time for it. The first 3000 days or 400 weeks, however, you want to see it, is built on small acts such as these. Physically, play promotes motor skills and coordination. Linguistically, it supports language acquisition and literacy. Crucially, play nurtures emotional resilience, helping children manage feelings and navigate social complexities. It also stimulates imagination and cultural understanding.
Overall, play is not merely recreational but essential for holistic development, laying the foundation for lifelong learning, social competence, and emotional well-being.
How can parents or whoever a child’s caregiver is, be sensitised to let the child be?
It is not so much as letting the child be as much as the adult engaging with the wonder of childhood. More conversations and access to materials and tools for the adult to make their own journey, be it in the form of parent coaches such as Piya Maker who is part of Bachpan Manao or listening to experts in the domain. And more than anything else watch the Bachpan Manao film and give yourself the license to pause and play.
There was a time when play in natural surroundings was a normal natural part of childhood. Today with technological advancements and a lack of playing grounds or parks or other green environs, it is difficult for a child to find the right kind of play. Gadgets are the new play. Comments
Children now play less outdoors. A global survey by The Child and Youth Advisory Board showed only 27 per cent of children play outside their homes today, in stark contrast to 71 per cent of our parents and grandparents. Urbanisation has reduced the availability of playing grounds and parks, limiting children’s opportunities for natural play. Not least, gadgets and digital devices have become the new norm for play. While technology offers access to play and learning content, excessive use by children can lead to impaired physical development, obesity, stress, sleep disorders and difficulties in social interaction. German neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Manfred Spitzer in fact has coined the term ‘digital dementia’ to refer to changing brain structures in a new generation due to excessive exposure to screens. Though these studies are preliminary, these are early warning signs to promote more free and outdoor play. While parents and caregivers can leverage technology as an aid to engage children in different kinds of play and learn activities, and balance screen time for children, they should encourage children to engage in diverse forms of free play to foster a well-rounded, healthy childhood experience.
There is a lot of unlearning that must be needed to look at parenting through childhood workshops. What are the common challenges?
The biggest challenge is the existing parental mindset towards childhood, which is approached with a sense of scarcity, anxiety and vulnerability. This manifests across rural and urban parents. While the rural and urban poor are caught up in the anxiety of not having access to good education and of their child being left behind and trapped in poverty like themselves, semi-urban and urban caregivers are plagued by increased pressure of success leading to constant comparison and competition, digital age concerns, mental health issues and an uncertain future.
This scarcity mindset needs to pave the way to an abundance mindset. Parents need to recognise that children come ready to grow and learn, and every interaction and experience, helps them do this. Childhood needs to be celebrated.
Parents feel insufficient and inadequate to help their children learn and grow. This is despite the abundance of care and attention they shower on their children. Only they do not perceive this care and attention as contributing to children’s development. Studies in fact say that this ‘responsive caregiving’ is what a child needs – play, conversation and care. To shift this self-perception from ‘I can’t’, ‘I don’t know’ to ‘I can’, ‘I know’, ‘I do’ will go a long way in changing the narrative of childhood in India.
Another big challenge is the mindset to play. Parents see play and learning as being mutually exclusive. Play but learn to write at the age of four, when the child’s hands are not ready. Being school-ready is not the same thing as mastering Class 1. Research pieces like that on primary caregivers undertaken by Illume shine some light on how mothers are feeling, “Aaj kal education ka level bhi bohot high hai. Bade bachhe bhi fail ho jaatein hain. Abhi se level nahin banayenge toh aage level nahin banega.” (Nowadays the level of education is very high. Older children also fail. Unless we do something early, we will not be able to do anything later.) In the context of learning one mother said, “Audio can be used to learn, but for him to understand the concept, he needs to write it down. I wish he would sit longer to study,” indicating her mindset around how her child will learn. An Indian parent sends their child to school to study. Ask this question in any Indian language. The answer is ‘padhne likne ke liye’, ‘odoke’, ‘saduvu kosam’ – all of these translate to ‘reading and writing’. We don’t have the vocabulary for play in school!
We hear and see of growing instances of children not speaking, walking on time. Is technology playing the villain? What would be your advice to parents to engage children?
This is not so at EkStep, we look at technology as an enabler. In the early years, we see technology as an enabler for the parents and caregivers. Not necessarily technology or screens in front of the child. ‘Technology as a villain’ itself is a very broad brush statement. Our advice to parents would be to utilise technology, to the extent that it supports them in improving the quality of interactions with their child.
As adults, how important is it to be childlike?
Being childlike can foster health and well-being, active learning, risk taking and problem solving, and creativity. Given the hazards of a sedentary lifestyle, playing and being physically active can enhance health and overall wellness. Play promotes physical, emotional, and social development. It reduces stress and builds relationships. It brings joy into life. Being present in the moment, like children often are, positively impacts well-being.
Children are always learning, ‘every living moment is a learning moment’. Bringing back curiosity, wonder and questioning into adult life leads to active learning that increases brain plasticity and retards age-related cognitive degeneration.
Children are less afraid of failure. They fail forward joyfully. Imbibing the quality of risk taking can lead to creative problem solving and innovations.
Child-like imagination and unbounded creativity can help adults navigate through the ambiguities and complexities of modern life.
I found the term Collabaction that you have used in your pitch very interesting. How effectively have you been able to work on this?
Collabactors of Bachpan Manao are champions of the growth of children. Collabactors together constitute a network who raise the level of conversation around early childhood and the foundational years. This is done through:
amplifying each others’ voices. For example, the Bachpan Manao newsletter and social media is a space where voices and actions of the collabactors are celebrated generating, curating and sharing content, insights and learnings. For example, the bachpan manao masterclass, that has witnessed an average of 80+ participants, is a space for cross-learnings acting for intergenerational impact by enabling actions that nudge mindset shift and behaviour change of caring adults. For example, partnering with Gram Vaani to craft a Bachpan Manao campaign for rural India, leveraging Mobile Vaani’s low-tech interactive voice platforms to trigger dialogue on early childhood
Another example is the co-creation of a microsite with Dost Education on responsive caregiving, Baatein Sneh aur Khel. The site contains photographs of existing responsive caregiving practice by families in India. These are public goods for use by the ecosystem for nudging behaviours within the community.
On 11 June, which UN declared as the International Day of Play, Bachpan Manao collabactors responded to the #HourOfFreePlay call with a tapestry of action across India, covering its diversity in language, socio-economic conditions and different abilities of children.
We call this Collabaction – collaborating for action and impact.
How do you see Bachpan Manao faring in the future?
Only when every household in India celebrates the abundance of childhood, will the future of children and adults, alike become secure. For this the societal imagination and narrative for the early childhood and foundational years in India should be ‘celebrate childhood’ or ‘bachpan manao’. India’s education and curricular policies already recognise the abundance of childhood and celebrate it through their call to ‘learn through play’. We have to rally around as a society to now translate th at into popular imagination and household practice.
Anything that you would like parents to keep in mind.
Recognise and celebrate the abundance of childhood.
Recognise and celebrate the abundance that you as parents are (‘you are enough’).
Recognise and celebrate the abundance of what you as parents are doing (‘you are doing enough’).
Bachpan Manao, Badhte Jao