S A Lone
Kashmir’s winter is not merely a season; it is a profound social, environmental, and administrative force that shapes daily life, tests governance, and demands urgent attention to human vulnerability. Across India, early childhood care systems are increasingly being recognized for their climate sensitivity, with seasonal breaks, adaptive infrastructure, and community-based outreach ensuring that young children are protected from environmental extremes.
Yet in Kashmir, the valley’s harsh winter amplifies existing structural inequities: schools close for months under Chillai Kalan, safeguarding schoolchildren, while Anganwadi Centres remain operational in freezing, poorly insulated rooms, exposing preschool-aged children and their caregivers to cold, illness, and developmental neglect.
The urgency is heightened by contemporary realities: prolonged winters, disrupted mobility, inconsistent public service delivery, and the heightened vulnerability of children from socioeconomically disadvantaged households. Global research underscores that the early years are a critical window for brain development, emotional resilience, and lifelong health; ignoring these developmental needs during Kashmir’s extreme winters not only perpetuates inequality but threatens the very foundation of human potential.
In this context, winter-adaptive policies for Anganwadis are not optional-they are urgent, indispensable, and a measure of the valley’s social conscience.
This neglect is amplified by governance gaps. The departments responsible for issuing winter vacation orders and those overseeing Anganwadis operate in silos, with no coordinated protocol, winter-readiness audits, or accountability mechanisms.
Frontline workers and parents are left to improvise solutions, while no grievance redressal or monitoring system exists to ensure that services continue safely during extreme cold. Beyond administrative oversight, this winter neglect disregards early childhood development science. Prolonged exposure to cold, inadequate stimulation, and inconsistent care during formative years can impair brain development, emotional regulation, language acquisition, immunity, and nutrition. Despite global evidence emphasizing the need for climate-adaptive, context-sensitive early learning environments, these principles rarely inform policy in Kashmir, leaving the most vulnerable children exposed to preventable risks.
The gendered dimension is equally significant. Anganwadi workers, predominantly women, traverse icy paths without protective gear or allowances, and mothers face enormous challenges in bringing children to centres or collecting nutrition rations. Winter neglect thus exacerbates gender inequities, placing the burden of survival and care on women while structural systems fail to protect them. Infrastructure deficits compound the problem: most centres lack insulation, safe flooring, toilets, heating, or weather-proof doors and windows.
While modest, locally feasible solutions-such as passive solar heating, insulated walls, or energy-efficient bukharis-exist, ICDS budgets do not prioritize winterization, leaving physical environments unsafe for children and staff alike.
Kashmir’s winter is also a predictable disaster scenario, yet Anganwadis are excluded from disaster preparedness and response frameworks. Snow-blocked roads, frozen water supplies, power outages, and hypothermia risks are common, but early childhood services remain absent from contingency planning, leaving children and caregivers unprotected when extreme weather hits.
Data gaps further weaken interventions; there is no systematic monitoring of winter attendance, child morbidity, developmental setbacks, or nutrition continuity. What is not measured is rarely addressed, and the consequences are far-reaching: increased illness, parental work disruption, maternal stress, developmental delays, and long-term remedial education costs. Investing in winterization, by contrast, would yield high social and economic returns while safeguarding human development.
Community participation, another untapped resource, could transform winter preparedness. Parents’ committees, Panchayats, and Village Health Sanitation and Nutrition Committees could mobilize low-cost, locally relevant solutions, from home-based nutrition delivery to cluster-based winter gatherings for mothers and children.
While initiatives such as transforming Anganwadis into Model Community Facilities, integrating some centres with NEP 2020 reforms, and upgrading preschools in districts like Udhampur show promise, modernization without climate resilience risks aesthetic uplift without substantive equity. A centre that is beautifully painted but freezing remains unfit for children, and the true test of reform lies not in isolated examples but in whether the system as a whole protects children in winter.
Protecting Anganwadi children in Kashmir is not merely an administrative challenge but a pressing moral and developmental imperative, especially when contrasted with adaptive early childhood practices emerging across India. Implementing winter-adaptive measures-including insulated infrastructure, flexible nutrition delivery, coordinated governance, disaster preparedness, community engagement, and gender-sensitive support-can prevent avoidable suffering, support developmental continuity, and reinforce social equity.
Urgency is paramount: every day of exposure during Chillai Kalan compounds health risks, disrupts learning, and undermines the promise of early childhood development. Only by embedding these measures into a systemic, climate-aware framework can the valley ensure that no child endures winter in silence and that early childhood care is recognized not as welfare, but as a foundational human right.
When every child experiences safety, warmth, dignity, and continuity of learning, Kashmir will not merely survive its winters; it will set a visionary standard of equity, resilience, and transformative social responsibility, bridging the gap between its unique climate realities and contemporary national and global standards.
Author can be mailed at shabirahmed.lone003@gmail.com
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