Building Better Anganwadis In Delhi, beauty is a powerul catalyst for social change and community engagement.

An anganwadi can root a community. It provides accessible early childhood education and nutrition programs, as well as health services for new and expectant mothers through India's Integrated Child Development Services Scheme.*

"Anganwadis catalyze incremental access to other basic services,” says Swati Janu, architect and founder of Social Design Collaborative. “Once established, they provide a legitimate address for the neighborhood, which helps pave the way for other municipal services. This systems-level outcome has been the key motivation behind this project."

Engineered by Ekarth Studio and built by Nafish Ahmad and his team of workers, Udaan went up in just two weeks, but groundbreaking came only after months of collaboration between teachers, families, and students of the village. The project was developed with the nonprofit Let's Educate Children in Need (LECIN) and supported by the Uttar Pradesh Department of Women and Child Development.

That collaborative design starts by getting on the children's level. From their vantage point, what can they see? This dictates how high up the walls murals are painted and where mirrors are positioned. How far can they reach? All bookshelves, cubbyholes, and wall-mounted games are placed to ensure every child is able to engage with their surroundings. The result is a space designed specifically for children, one that considers how pedagogy can be pushed beyond the walls of the classroom to encourage children's gross and fine motor skill development.

Elsewhere around Delhi, that same consideration applies to the land, territories and, ecologies the childcare centers themselves occupy.

In February 2026, the Kisan Bati anganwadi along the Yamuna River began its classes. It was built with materials sourced on-site, in collaboration with local waste pickers and farmers, giving a new lease of life to once-discarded resources found along the riverbank.

"While the rest of the river floodplains are fast gentrifying with the riverfront development in Delhi," explains Janu, "the learning center here caters to farming communities whose livelihoods have been linked to the river for decades."

Flooding along the banks of the Yamuna has become more frequent, as increasingly intense and wet storms dump more water on the region. In recent years, the Yamuna has swelled to record water levels while Delhi has set 40-year rainfall highs. Combined with record-breaking heat, the conditions ask much of any built intervention. A floor of rubber cow mats, layered atop plastic pallets, raises the living surface above floodwater and adapts to the uneven, shifting ground that floods leave behind. The anganwadi's bamboo frame holds the structure together through the lateral force of strong seasonal winds that could crack or collapse a more rigid frame. Farmers will soon cover the roof with river weed, creating a small yet meaningful air pocket to insulate the sheet roofing, limiting heat transfer and keeping students and teachers noticeably cooler during Delhi's notoriously stifling summers.

"Families in these neighborhoods have always used local materials and transient techniques of construction as responsive mechanisms to natural disasters or human-driven crises," says Janu. "Building materials are not just selected for affordability, but also ease of dismantling and rebuilding in case of an eviction or climate-induced risks. Innovation in these contexts means building upon these technologies and traditional knowledge used by the communities over time instead of transplanting our idea of design."

Safer, stronger building practices that Janu and her team lobby for help make these existing processes more sustainable and resilient.

Udaan and Kisan Bati are both modular and open-source interventions; their underlying designs can be adapted to local conditions and needs. Toolkits, complete with models, pamphlets, posters, a DIY handbook, and stencils for text and iconography, are used by women retrofitting their own homes into a creche.* Already, the designs have been replicated in some 150 homes across rural India.

New daycares continue to pop up, and Social Design Collaborative is now collaborating with the Ministry of Women and Child Development to expand to 25 additional communities.

"Beautiful, inspiring spaces play an important role in people's lives and in creating a sense of pride and ownership," Janu says. "Beauty can be a powerful catalyst for social change and community engagement that activates social workers, activists, and human rights lawyers working together in interdisciplinary ways."