Importance of Early Child Care (ECE)

Every child coming into this world is eager to learn. The First Five years of life are a time of enormous growth of linguistic, conceptual, social, emotional, and motor competence. Right from birth a healthy child is an active participant in that growth, exploring the environment, learning to communicate, and beginning to construct ideas about how things work in the surrounding world. The pace of learning, however, will depend on an engaging, encouraging and supporting environment. There can be no doubt now that the environment in which a child grows up has a powerful impact on how the child develops and what the child learns.

Envisioning a world free of poverty and hunger, to reduce inequality, and to combat climate change, United Nations has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be achieved world-over by 2030, in which SDG 4 is concerning access to Education For All, which recognizes education as the most powerful tool of empowerment.  As education starts the day, a child comes in this world, Nobel laureate Dr. James Heckman enunciated an important principle of the present day education that- 

                     “Early learning begets later learning and early success breeds later

                                 success, just as early failure breeds later failure”,

Based on this principle, the UNESCO Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report proclaimed that-

                       “Early Childhood Care And Education (ECCE) is the bedrock of

                                    Education For All initiative.”

India joined this Global Initiative by bringing Early Childhood Care And Education (ECCE) into one of its priorities by incorporating it in the National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP 2020) as -

                        “Universal provisioning of quality early childhood development, care, and education

                                        must be achieved (in our country) as soon as possible,

                                                       and no later than 2030”.

The above mentioned policy initiatives amply clarify that ensuring world class quality in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) is the priority set by our government as an essential initiative for nation building in which everyone is invited to join hands.