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NITI Aayog released 'Reimagining Care: Strategies for Empowering Caregivers in Viksit Bharat@2047'.
The report positions caregiving as a skilled, dignified and valued profession rather than informal family labour.
It calls for building a cadre of trained caregivers to meet current and future demand for care services.
It identifies opportunities for Indian caregiver professionals in global markets.
The launch was attended by five Central ministries and departments alongside UNFPA, WHO, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the ILO.
The care economy covers the work of looking after those who cannot fully look after themselves - the very young, the elderly, the sick and persons with disabilities. Most of it in India is unpaid, performed within households, and performed overwhelmingly by women, which is why it is largely invisible in economic statistics: it produces no invoice, so it enters no output measure. Two forces are now making that invisibility untenable. The first is demographic - India's population is ageing, household sizes are shrinking and migration separates the old from the young, so the family can no longer be assumed to absorb care needs by default. The second is economic - unpaid care is the single largest reason women exit or never enter the labour force, so every hour of care that remains unpaid and unshared is an hour of potential female employment forgone. Professionalising care is the policy response to both: it converts an invisible obligation into paid, skilled and recognised work, which simultaneously creates employment, frees family members for other work and improves quality through training. The export angle follows naturally, because ageing societies elsewhere face acute caregiver shortages - which is why the Ministry of External Affairs and the ILO were in the room alongside the social-sector ministries.
Simple Analogy: Care has always been work; the question is only whether it is counted, trained and paid - or assumed, unskilled and free.
GS Paper 1 > Society: Population and Ageing; GS Paper 2 > Social Sector; GS Paper 3 > Employment
General Awareness > Reports and Current Affairs
General Awareness > Economy and Reports
Assertion (A) and Reason (R) are given below. Choose the correct option: Assertion (A): Population explosion occurs when death rates decline rapidly but birth rates remain high. Reason (R): Societal reproductive behavior changes instantly with improvements in healthcare.
Answer: A is true, but R is false
NITI Aayog reports and the care economy are increasingly common in UPSC GS-1 society and GS-3 employment questions.
The work of caring for children, the elderly, the sick and persons with disabilities - largely unpaid, household-based and performed by women in India.
Care performed without remuneration, invisible in output statistics and the largest single constraint on women's labour force participation.
A trained, professionally recognised workforce for care services, which the report seeks to build.
The Government's framing of India's development goals for the centenary of independence, under which the report is positioned.