Towards a postcolonial welfare state? Women’s organisations and early childhood care and education in India, 1945-1975

​The presentation discusses the conditions of the emergence of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) program, launched in 1975 as India’s major public-funded Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) scheme.  Today, after fifty years of its existence, more than half of 3–4-year-olds benefit from the ICDS, delivered through a country-wide network of Anganwadi centres. Building on the recent historiography on India’s postcolonial welfare regime, and the history of development, I argue that highly educated women reformers, and women’s voluntary associations laid the foundations of the ICDS. In preparation of and in the immediate aftermath of Indian independence, organised nationalist women argued that ECCE was the foundation of universal education, the formation of citizens, and the building of a democratic welfare state. They developed new ECCE institutions, including the Anganwadi, and training programs for the rural social and child welfare workers who would run them. Women experts and politicians drove the policy agenda for ECCE. I ask, how far we can understand these developments as a country-specific, postcolonial variation of women building the welfare state. ​