This International Women’s Day, India needs to confront its national care crisis. India’s female labour force participation stands at just 33% – one of the lowest rates in the world. Reaching Viksit Bharat’s goal of 70% by 2047 will require addressing the barriers that keep women out of work.The most significant of those barriers is care work.With respect to unpaid domestic work alone, Indian women who perform it spend significantly more time, around five hours a day on average, than men who perform the same activities, spending 1.4 hours. Time spent by women on unpaid care and domestic work is time unavailable for them to engage in paid work, skill development, or entrepreneurship.This reality remains across both rural and urban India. Looking after children, ageing parents and family members with disabilities, domestic chores like cooking and cleaning are still culturally coded as the responsibility of women alone. In rural areas, caregiving also includes collecting water and firewood, tending to livestock. In the corporate world, this translates into career breaks, reducing women’s lifetime earnings and curbs them from growing into leaders. Many women do not return to the workforce at all.India now stands at a demographic inflection point. It is racing to create jobs for a young population where nearly a third of young people in India are not in employment, education, or training, many of whom are women. At the same time, projections suggest that close to 20% of India’s population will be elderly by 2050, which will increase care demands exponentially.The pressure on women to take on caring for the elderly will intensify precisely at the moment when the country needs more women in the workforce, not fewer.Care is critical infrastructure, just like highwaysWe treat roads as economic multipliers. We finance freight corridors and industrial corridors. Why not finance childcare centres? Why not invest in eldercare systems with the same seriousness we reserve for physical infrastructure?Evidence suggests investing in care is a strong employment stimulus to spur job creation and increase women’s labour force participation. Every rupee spent expanding care services including early childhood care and long-term care, could create substantial employment opportunities, particularly for women. Studies also show that equivalent public spending on care services can create far more jobs than the same spending on construction because care services are highly labour-intensive and generate broad labour demand.We do not ask whether highways “pay for themselves” in isolation. Their value lies in the ecosystem they make possible. They reduce transaction costs, expand labour mobility, and stimulate private investment. Care functions in much the same way. Over time, jobs created in the care sector and related support services will lead to higher employment, expand consumption, raise aggregate demand, and strengthen the national tax base, reinforcing fiscal sustainability.The Nordic economies have long invested in universal childcare systems as part of their social and economic model. These countries have also consistently achieved some of the highest female LFPRs worldwide, where providing universal or low‑fee childcare has been correlated to over 70 per cent employment rates for women.Few investments offer such strong dividends, yet care continues to lack commensurate fiscal recognition in India.Fragmented spending across the Union Budget 2026-27National care-related expenditures remain dispersed across ministries as diverse as Women and Child Development, Health, Social Justice, Rural Development, Jal Shakti, Labour & Employment, as isolated schemes rather than as a coordinated system.This year’s Union Budget saw increases in gender budget allocations, expanded nutrition and childcare spending and announced plans to train 1.5 lakh caregivers. Yet it stopped short of recognising care as economic infrastructure or creating a dedicated financing architecture.Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0 indicated a budget estimate of Rs 23,100 crore, but is still focused largely on nutrition, not universal full-day childcare. Allocations towards Mission Shakti Samarthya including working women’s hostels and creches and the National Social Assistance Programme for basic pensions to the elderly, widows and persons with disabilities remain relatively modest. The Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare was allocated around Rs 1 lakh crore, a significant increase from the previous year, yet it lacks explicitly earmarked allocations for structured community based long-term elder or disability care services.In total, identifiable care allocations amount to roughly Rs 25,000 crore, likely still under only 1% of total Union expenditure. By contrast, roads and highways command roughly over 5% of the Budget.This sharp difference is not an argument against roads. There is a need for consistency in how we define economic infrastructure.A national care infrastructure mission: Contours of a care budgetThe 2024 National Care Strategy too notes the current state of fragmented care spending on welfare and skilling, rather than being one strategic investment. Other areas such as time-saving infrastructure such as water and clean cooking can free up additional time for women but are still not considered a part of national care spending.A National Care Infrastructure Mission could consolidate responsibility and financing while allowing line ministries to implement sector-specific programmes. The Ministry of Finance urgently needs a consolidated Care Expenditure Statement, making visible what is currently scattered.Such a mission would focus on upgrading Anganwadis into full-day childcare centres with professionalised staffing and developing community-based elder and disability care systems and in coordination to complement Bal Vatika’s under the National Education Policy. It would require labour protections towards formalising and protecting the care workforce but also expanding time-saving infrastructure such as access to piped water and clean cooking.Even allocating 1.5–2% of total Union expenditure toward a structured care mission would still remain modest relative to other capital sectors. Investing in care need not rely solely on public expenditure and can also be prioritised within CSR allocations to incentivise care facilities in manufacturing hubs, IT zone and industrial parks.Reframing fiscal prioritiesInvesting in women-led development and inclusive growth requires investing in the systems that enable half of the nation’s population to work.There is a need for a unified legislative framework, pooled financing mechanism, and inter-ministerial coordination architecture that treats care as an integrated economic sector.The Union Budget 2027 presents an opportunity to announce a centrally anchored initiative that treats care not just as welfare spending but as core economic infrastructure.Feroza Sanjana is a political analyst and academic. Previously, she has been a policy advisor on South Asia to the European Union. She was a Visiting Professor in Political Science at Freie University Berlin and a Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University, California. She has contributed to several UN publications on transforming care systems in Asia-Pacific.The author would like to thank Shonali Thangiah for research support.