TL;DR The daycare abuse case at Capgemini in Bengaluru, an unlisted company with no disclosure obligations, exposed a wider pattern: among India’s largest listed companies, BRSR filings show daycare coverage varies widely and inconsistently across sectors, genders, and employment categories. Some firms (Infosys, SBI, Steel Authority of India, MRF) report zero coverage every year; others swing between 0% and 100% year to year. Coverage is often full for women but zero for men. Meanwhile, public crèches have shrunk 80% in a decade, even as disclosure, not verified provision, became the substitute safety net.

Context

A daycare centre is supposed to be one of the safest places a working parent can imagine. Parents leave children there because they believe someone else is watching. Employers advertise childcare because they believe it helps people return to work. Regulators ask companies to disclose daycare because they believe transparency encourages better workplaces.

Last week, those assumptions collided. In late June 2026, videos began circulating among parents at Capgemini’s Brookfield campus in Bengaluru showing toddlers being mistreated at “Little Buds,” a crèche operating on the technology company’s premises.

But the questions raised by this episode extend far beyond one employer. For nearly a decade, India has required many employers to provide crèche facilities. Since 2022, the country’s largest listed companies have also been required to disclose childcare facilities in their Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reports (BRSR), part of an ambitious effort by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to measure corporate responsibility beyond profits.

Today’s article examines years of BRSR disclosures alongside government crèche scheme data, compares them across industries and company sizes, and assesses how Indian companies disclose on childcare and how that compares with the state of public crèche provision.

Who Compiles This Data?

The data on the daycare facilities coverage by the employees is collated under the BRSR framework and is reported under Principle 3, which talks about measures for the well-being of the employees. The data on public creche provision is compiled from the Parliamentary responses.

Where can I download clean & structured data related to this?

Clean, standardised, and analysis-ready collection of related datasets on Business Reporting and Sustainability Reports on Dataful. Explore data across companies and principles across years for seamless comparison and trend analysis.

Key Insights

What Company Filings Reveal About Workplace Daycare

Since 2021, India’s market regulator has required the country’s 1,000 largest listed companies to publish an annual Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR). Among other disclosures, companies must report how many of their employees and workers are covered by daycare facilities.

The disclosure goes beyond a simple yes-or-no answer. Companies must provide headcounts across every employment category, permanent and non-permanent, employees and workers, and men and women, for benefits including health insurance, accident insurance, maternity and paternity benefits, and daycare. This makes it possible to calculate a daycare coverage ratio: the share of a company’s workforce that is officially covered by daycare facilities. For this analysis, the top companies by their net worth among different sectors are chosen.

Daycare Coverage Across Sectors

Technology. Capgemini India, at the centre of the Bengaluru crèche abuse case, is unlisted and does not file BRSR reports. Among the listed IT firms, the disclosures vary widely. Tata Consultancy Services does not have daycare facilities, while it has location-wise tie-ups with third-party-run daycare centres, which employees can avail. Infosys does not report any daycare figures, as it provides onsite, proximity and network (near-home) childcare support options for employees in India, based on their preference. LTIMindtree and  HCL Tech consistently report full coverage,  100% for their permanent employees. Wipro improved its coverage from 82% in 2022-23 to 100% in 2024-25, while only 62% of Tech Mahindra permanent employees and 57% of non-permanent employees are covered in 2024-25. Across the sector, companies classify almost their entire workforce as employees, with virtually no worker-category disclosures.

Automobiles. Tata Motors reports full daycare coverage across its workforce. Maruti Suzuki, Eicher Motors and Hyundai report full coverage for women but none for men, leaving overall coverage in the single digits because men make up most of their workforce. Ashok Leyland reports full coverage for workers but recently reduced employee coverage from 47% in 2023-24 to zero in 2024-25, while MRF reports no daycare figures across any employment category.

Mining and Metals. Coal India and Hindalco report near-universal coverage for permanent employees and workers. JSW Steel reports full coverage for permanent employees but none for non-permanent employees and permanent workers. NMDC follows the same pattern seen in automobiles, with full coverage for women but not for men. Steel Authority of India reports no daycare figures across any employment category.

Banking and Finance. State Bank of India reports zero daycare coverage across all categories and years. HDFC Bank moved from no coverage to full, gender-neutral coverage in 2024-25. ICICI Bank initially reported full coverage (2023-24 and 2022-23) before dropping male disclosures in its latest filing for 2024-25. Kotak Mahindra Bank mirrors the gender-split pattern seen in other sectors. No bank reports daycare coverage for workers, with virtually no worker-category disclosures.

Public Creches down by 80% in the last decade

Long before workplace childcare became part of ESG disclosures, India viewed childcare as a public responsibility. The country’s crèche programme, which evolved into the Rajiv Gandhi National Crèche Scheme, was designed to support children of women working in the informal sector by providing day care, nutrition, health services and preschool education. For much of the last decade, the programme operated through a network of roughly 19,000 crèches. That began to change after 2017, when the scheme was restructured as the National Crèche Scheme, and implementation shifted to the states under a cost-sharing model. The transition coincided with a steep decline in operational centres, from 16,853 in 2015–16 to 8,018 in 2018–19, and further down to 3,045 as of February 2025.

This contraction of the public childcare network coincided with a parallel shift in policy emphasis toward employer-supported care. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 required establishments with 50 or more employees to provide crèche facilities, while SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) framework later required large listed companies to disclose whether they offered daycare. Together, these measures marked a gradual rebalancing of India’s childcare landscape, away from direct public provision and toward greater reliance on the workplace.

In 2022, the government folded the National Crèche Scheme into the Palna component of Mission Shakti. The redesigned scheme retained existing standalone crèches while introducing Anganwadi-cum-Crèches (AWCCs) to integrate childcare with the country’s Anganwadi network. Under the 15th Finance Commission cycle (2021–22 to 2025–26), the Centre has envisioned 17,000 AWCCs, of which 11,395 had been approved as of the latest parliamentary reply.

Disclosure was supposed to work in theory, but suffers from practical concerns

The basic premise behind BRSR-style ESG disclosure is that public companies are reputation-sensitive and capital-market-sensitive in ways that make transparency a lever for behaviour change even without a compliance framework. However, two structural features of this specific disclosure prove that it might not always be true.

First, the metric asks companies to report a headcount of employees “covered,” not a fact about a physical facility, its staffing ratio, its safety record, or whether it is inspected. A company that ties up with an external vendor, as Capgemini had done at its Brookfield campus, can report coverage while having limited visibility, by its own design, into what happens on the vendor’s side of that arrangement. Nothing in the disclosure format requires a company to report whether it audits, inspects, or holds accountable the third party actually running the crèche.

Second, disclosure without assurance is a weaker lever than disclosure with it. SEBI’s phased assurance requirements for BRSR Core currently prioritise environmental and select social metrics for independent verification; daycare coverage is not among them. Unlike the emissions and select social metrics now subject to phased third-party assurance, daycare coverage numbers are unaudited self-disclosures.

One common limitation, though not a structural one, is to limit the day-care facility coverage to only females and for select types of workers, such as permanent, etc. This practice is difficult to justify on the law’s own terms: Section 11A of the Maternity Benefit Act deliberately uses the gender-neutral term “employees,” not “female employees,” precisely so that eligibility would not be limited by sex. Restricting the benefit to women also encodes, at the level of company policy, the assumption that childcare is a woman’s responsibility rather than a shared one, the same assumption the gender-neutral drafting of the law was written to avoid reinforcing. Restricting it further to Permanent staff compounds the problem in the opposite direction: Non-Permanent employees and Workers are typically the most economically precarious part of a company’s workforce, with the least job security and the least ability to absorb the cost of private childcare, making them the group with the greatest practical need for the benefit and, on this evidence, the group most often excluded from it.

Why Does It Matter?

Daycare is increasingly recognised as essential workplace infrastructure, shaping women’s workforce participation, employee retention and caregiving equality. Yet BRSR filings reveal that access remains uneven, inconsistently reported and often limited to women, despite childcare being a shared family responsibility. Because companies disclose workforce coverage rather than simply confirming whether a crèche exists, these filings offer a rare way to compare childcare access across India’s largest employers. They also expose how gaps in reporting can obscure the true availability of workplace childcare.

Key Numbers

• Creches in India under the National Creche Scheme and now Palna:
  2013-14: 19,809 ; 2017-18: 18040 ;  2023: 3906 ;  2025: 3045