Balancing Universal and Contextual Childcare Needs: Envisioning Gender Responsive Models Beyond “One-Size Fits All”

India’s childcare provisioning remains fragmented and anchored in a standardised “average” model that fails to respond to the diverse realities of women’s lives, especially informal workers, migrants, marginalised social groups, and women in stigmatised occupations who require tailored childcare support. By neglecting intersecting barriers of gender, caste, class, migration, and occupation, current approaches reinforce gendered familialism, undervalue care work, and constrain women’s labour force participation on deeply unequal terms. This paper critiques the one-size-fits-all approach and argues for universal childcare provisioning grounded in six guiding principles for inclusive and responsive care systems: equity, flexibility, quality, sustainability, community engagement, and gender-transformative design. These principles are illustrated through diverse state and civil society models documented in ISST’s Care Compendium. By aligning rights-based commitments with context-specific solutions, India can move from homogenous, one-size-fits-all models to adaptive care systems that address systemic inequities and uphold the dignity, agency, and well-being of all women, children, and caregivers.