JOIN USDistraught at seeing bright young women at the workplace having to abruptly give up their jobs to raise their children, an empathetic Sridevi Raghavan asked herself: “Should family and career be antipodes?”
“This was happening to a lot of my colleagues,” recalls Sridevi about those days in the early 2000, when she had just set out on a creative career with a top
advertising company after a master’s degree in economics from the University of adras. It triggered a churning process in her, essaying a new idea. Why not take child centres to work spaces itself to spare women of quitting jobs altogether?
But her idea’s time had not yet come. It had to wait until Sridevi went to the
Harvard Business School for doing an MBA in 2008.
Childcare centres for working professionals are not new. But Sridevi’s innovative spin to it came when she incubated this idea of “on-site day-care centres for children”, with the help of her husband Raghavan Jawahar (then in Hong Kong where he was managing the Far Eastern Operations of one of India’s largest leather product manufacturers), while she wrote a new business idea for the HBS “Business Plan Contest”.
Some of the jury members “really liked the idea” and US-based private equity firm Equity Management Associates (EMA) “even came forward to fund our idea,” Sridevi and Raghavan, an ‘Econometrics’ man, said talking to Deccan Herald. “That’s how Amelio – short for ‘ameliorate’ to make something better--was born,” said Sridevi. Her MBA done, both Sridevi and Raghavan, moved to India to set up Amelio Child Care Pvt Ltd in Chennai in August 2008. The stage-setting for this foray happened in Bangalore earlier when both worked there, but “we decided to give it a try first in Chennai as it is our home,” says Sridevi.
There has been no turning back for this young couple in their mid-30s, since they set up the first Amelio Childcare Centre (ACC) at Sholinganallur, at the heart of the fast-emerging information technology (IT) corridor of greater Chennai. The onset of a global recession that year did not deter them.
“At the height of a recession, we wanted to break it with a new idea; we decided to showcase an on-site model of a pre-school and day-care centre,” to techies and top IT professionals, said Raghavan, explaining how they took up a large 5,500 sq ft space at Sholinganallur, along the IT corridor.
“This helped to open the door out to everybody,” recalled Raghavan. As the joint family system crumbles in urban India and heads of nuclear families chase incomes to pay their housing loan EMIs, there is hardly any time left for kids. Thus, Sridevi and Raghavan’s joint initiative was challenging, as they had to go above “conventional solutions” offered by crèches.
A new curriculum for the ACCs had to be evolved. “In most of the developed world, there is no distinction between care and learning for a child,” pointed out Sridevi. In the first five years of the child – when brain development is maximal-- learning and caring are dovetailed abroad. But in India, the two are separated. Children, if lucky, are simply sent to schools with very little or no attendant caring.
Having lived abroad, Sridevi and Raghavan were convinced that unless both processes were “meshed”, when cared for children saw learning as entry into a new “world of discovery” with love and joy in that activity, their new concept of childcare centres at the workplace will make no difference.
Soon with help of an “Advisory Board”, which included child psychologists, neonatology specialists and nutritionists, “we developed a new curriculum ourselves, bringing in the best practices, which are also appropriate for the kids attention span of their age,” explained Sridevi. The curriculum is constantly evolving; we are proud of it as kids enjoy coming to school; most importantly, they love learning and the process of discovery,” added Sridevi on Amelio’s USP.
In the last four years, Sridevi and Raghavan have set up seven Amelio
on-site childcare centres in and around Chennai. “We want to have more such on-site day-care centres at the workplace and plan to expand to other cities like Bangalore in a phased manner,” said Raghavan.
Catering for children from six-month old up to eight years, Amelio, depending on the working parents’ needs, offer their facilities in three categories: pre-school programme, an after-school programme, where kids could come after attending a regular school to be taken care of till 7 pm every day, and a full-day care programme from 8-30 am to 7 pm. It works well for companies too, who are ready to give us space, said Sridevi. “Companies have no issues, for the benefits far outweigh other things; women too feel relieved as they can safely entrust their kids and are able to attend work sans any absenteeism,” she added.
Caring for nearly 500 children in all their centres so far, integral to this child-care model is, “for every six children we have one teacher; for infants, we maintain a 1:3 teacher-infant ratio,” she said.
Perfectionists to the core, Sridevi and Raghavan have put their two-year-old daughter Sukruthi in an Amelio centre to rid their model of any subjectivist tag. “Personally, this is the ultimate test for us,” added Raghavan, hoping it will spawn a holistic child development programme, drawing all parents “grappling with what to do or where to put your child”. Amelio hopes to fill that gap.