Comments
EuroKids International, a leading pre-school educator, has taken the mantra of ‘catch them young’ to the next level. The teaching institution has tied up with leading corporates to venture into day care for women employees' kids right from six months to 17 months.
The initiative will help corporates meet the newly enacted Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act 2017 which increased women’s leave entitlements from 12 to 26 weeks.
Enterprises with 50 or more employees must also provide crèches and allow the mothers to make four crèche visits daily. As per the norms, the costs of these benefits are to be borne solely by employers.
In the last nine months, EuroKids has opened seven day care centres which are offered under three variants — on site, near site and community model.
It has opened two on site day care centres at Cummins India factories at Dewas and Pithampur in Indore and one each at IIM Indore and SBI Global Innovation Centre in Navi Mumbai.
It has tied up with JSW Group, Marico and Tata Sky for setting a near site day care centre at Kalina in Mumbai and another at Thiruvananthapuram for Oracle's women employees.
Under the community model, EuroKids will provide day care facility at EuroKids’ pre-schools so that mothers who cannot carry their kids closer to office can avail the same facility near their residence. EuroKids recently opened one such facility in Kolkata.
Prajodh Rajan, Founder and CEO, Eurokids International, said enquiries from corporates for opening day care centre is on the rise as they want to abide by the new norms at the earliest.
Though corporates currently bear 70 per cent of the cost, it will remain the only concern going ahead as providing a quality facility with nurses and trained staff to handle tiny-tots is going to be an expensive affair, he said.
“We are also considering the growing demand for preparing food for kids in the centre as working women find it difficult to prepare the nutritional food suggested by us," he said.
EuroKids charges the highest of ₹18,000 a month for the centre at Kalina, while the average fee in other centres varies between ₹10,000 and ₹15,000 a month.
At present, EuroKids Day Care Centre takes care of 60-70 kids and plans to enhance the number of centres to 100 from six in two years.
Over time, day-care centre would grow much faster and complement the pre-school business as the government enforces the Maternity Benefit Act strictly, said Rajan.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.