The Bengaluru city police swung into action by constituting a special team to probe the case, while the IT giant Capgemini temporarily shut down the on-campus facility. The company, which outsourced operations to a third-party vendor, seemed oblivious to the abuse, and parents did not have the slightest inkling of it. The perpetrators were caregivers, and the person in charge was allegedly complicit. Crucially, the abuse came to light only because a whistleblower alerted an official of the district child protection unit, rather than through in-built checks.

The Muzaffarpur shelter home case, exposed through a social audit from a Tata Institute of Social Sciences project, sheds light on the vulnerability of children in government-funded, NGO-run childcare institutions. The widely reported case should have prompted governments, NGOs and corporate entities to review safety in their respective institutions and take the necessary preventive steps.

Running childcare institutions like impenetrable prisons enables the perpetration of abuse. Many private and government crèches are kept out of bounds even to parents and guardians. The government should strike a balance between restricting access for safety reasons and maintaining openness and transparency as safeguards. Periodic audits should be conducted by credible civil society, local community organisations and child rights NGOs. More often than not, these audits are carried out half-heartedly as a routine exercise. Moreover, such exercises would be futile without creating safe spaces and instilling confidence in children to speak openly and report abuse, if any, without fear.

The Bengaluru case reveals that employing female caregivers does not automatically make a childcare facility safe or foolproof. Without values-based and skills training to inculcate and reinforce kindness, empathy and a commitment to service, they too can be cruel and heartless. Often, owners of commercial crèches hire untrained staff at notoriously low wages to cut costs and maximise profits. They do not give due importance to training, professional skills, background checks and references, carrying them out only perfunctorily to tick boxes. Failure to address the emotional and physical exhaustion that leads to periodic burnout among care staff also adversely affects the quality of service. Likewise, over-reliance on CCTV surveillance is no substitute for effective oversight.