Why Made in Play Summit? Simply because we need it to be a national level critical action conversation which happens not only in a meeting room but also in homes across the country at the same time. Made in Play Summit is the first national level televised summit with attention on play and the early years of childhood brought by NDTV through Bachpan Mano and EkStep Foundation. An even simpler answer is that as humans we are “made in play” and the children of India today more than ever need the space, time and the opportunity to 'grow in play'. The only people who need to recognise and make this happen for every child no matter where they are is a caring adult.
What does this look like? That's what “Made in Play” is about. It is about caring adults showing up to listen to voices of play - essentially children's take on play, to engage with ideas on how to make play come alive for the children in their care, and not least for themselves. And acknowledging that India has no choice but to invest in play and infuse the essence of play into our daily lives. A grand parent singing a lullaby to their grandchild. Parents and grandparents coming to a children's festival in their Anganwadi and spontaneously breaking into song and dance. A child climbing a tree for the first time and a caring adult allowing them to do it being within reach. A mother together with her 5 year old son sorting vegetables and making up new names for them.
All of this is Play. What is it not - everytime a child points to a red car on the road, the caring adult asks the child to count all the red cars parked on the road. Not every moment needs to become a teaching moment. The essence of play is that every moment is inherently a learning moment particularly for our youngest and it occurs naturally and is an invitation to an adult to engage with it. Made in Play brings together people who think about play from very different places. From Anganwadi workers who make play come alive for children - you will understand why they do the work they do. Early years educators who will speak and show what play means to them and how they make it come alive in their work with children. Psychologists, Comedians, play facilitators and artists give their take on play. It gives centre stage to the true expert on Play - the only voices of play that matters - the voices of children from across India - who may not be seen but whose presence will be felt.
The reason for Made is Play is not to convince every caring adult about the reason and the logic for play. But to make space to truly experience and listen with intent and acknowledge that we are all “made in play”. June 11th is International day of Play and the theme is this year is Protect Play Protect Childhood, Made in Play summit is bringing attention to this clarion call and inviting every caring adult to stand up for play and for the sake of childhood in India. I have been in enough rooms this year to know that something is shifting.
Parents who are exhausted by the pace they have set for their children. Educators who know, instinctively, that something important is missing from their classrooms but cannot name it in a way that survives a parent-teacher meeting. Policymakers who care deeply about children and are working inside systems that have no language for what cannot be measured. What is missing, in almost every case, is the same thing.
Play.
Play that goes beyond being a reward at the end of a school day. Not play as a structured enrichment activity with a learning outcome attached. Instead, play as the first and most essential form of learning a child has. Play as the thing that, when we protect it, makes everything else possible.
What We Forgot In The Rush To Build
India has built schools. It has built Anganwadis, mid-day meal programmes, and digital learning platforms. It passed landmark right to education legislation and, five years ago, a National Education Policy and National Curriculum Framework - Foundation Stage that put early childhood on the national agenda. The infrastructure exists. In many places, it is working. And yet, as we built everything a child needs to learn, we kept forgetting to protect the one thing every child already knows how to do. And yet the child at the centre of all that building is either not “ready” or is more scheduled, more assessed, and more exhausted than any previous generation. Coaching centres outnumber parks in most Indian cities. The child in under-resourced environments is deprived of the basic building blocks of learning- space and time for curious exploration and joy of learning. In other settings a child's week is a jigsaw of classes, assessments, and structured enrichment, each one designed with genuine love and genuine anxiety by parents who want the best. And each one quietly consumes the one resource a young child cannot do without: - time to engage in playful learning within learning spaces and unstructured open time to freely explore though Play. The science is unambiguous. Over 85% of brain development happens by age six.
Not sixteen. Six. What's common between a child living in an under-resourced home experiencing adverse childhood experiences and a child living in a highly resourced environment with over scheduled experiences is that both are impacting the child developmentally and negatively. What drives that child development is not only instruction, or flashcards, or curated apps. It is free play. The child who builds something and knocks it down and builds it back again. The child who makes up rules to a game that has no rules. What looks random to an adult is the brain doing its most important work. Play builds executive function: focus, impulse control, flexible thinking, the ability to recover from failure. These are not soft skills. They are the hard architecture of a functioning human mind. Bachpan is Gr8 when creativity, stories, social bonding, all round skills, everyday language and math, nature and quiet time are not separate from learning and development - this is what makes for thriving childhoods - they foster language, resilience, imagination, empathy, confidence, and a sense of self. The time to act is now - the cost of optimising for the wrong thing will begin to show.
Rethinking What We Call Investment
Infrastructure is what a society builds because it believes in the future. Roads, because people need to move. Hospitals, because people need to heal. Schools, because people need to learn. Play is infrastructure for the same reason: because children need to develop. Beyond just intellectually, to also develop emotionally, socially, physically, and imaginatively. Development is not a metaphor. It is a biological process, and play is its primary mechanism. As also experiences of storytelling, creativity, social connection, all round skills, everyday language and math, nature and quiet time that make Bachpan Gr8 by forming the wider developmental architecture through which children learn to think, feel, relate, and imagine. Play does not require expensive toys or curated learning kits. It requires three things: time, space, and permission. Of these, permission is the hardest to give, because it requires adults to step back, to tolerate mess and noise and apparent purposelessness, and to trust that the child who appears to be doing nothing is, in fact, doing everything.
The Playbook of Play, released this year by Rohini Nilekani, makes this case in its most distilled form. The book, intentionally, provocatively, is largely blank. It is, as Rohini described at its launch, a permission slip.
Permission for parents to stop filling every moment. Permission for educators to stop measuring every outcome. Permission for policymakers to recognise that what cannot be tested is not therefore without value.
"Childhood itself is the greatest teacher. When we kindle children's curiosity, we give them tools for lifelong learning that no amount of money can buy. We have put our children into so many little boxes where they cannot find themselves anymore. Play doesn't need a manual. These blank pages are a reminder to let children explore and enjoy”.
What Viksit Bharat Needs That No Classroom Can Give
India has a clear ambition for 2047. A developed nation. An innovative economy. A society that can compete and lead on the global stage. The conversations about how to get there tend to focus on technology, skilling, higher education reform, research and development. Almost none of them start at birth. But they should.
The workforce India needs in 2047, creative, adaptive, collaborative, resilient, capable of navigating ambiguity and generating original ideas, is not built in later years in higher education institutions. It is built in the first eight years of life, and in the quality of the experiences a child has before they ever enter a formal classroom. You cannot build a thinking, innovative nation on a foundation of children who were not allowed to imagine. You cannot build a resilient society from citizens who were not permitted to question, fail safely, repeatedly, redo, and try again without fear of consequence, which is precisely what play offers and formal structured instruction so rarely does. In a world of accelerating uncertainty, of technologies, economies, and climates that shift faster than any curriculum can track, the single most future-proof investment a society can make is in children who know how to think, adapt, and create. Not children who know the right answers, but children who know how to ask better questions. That capacity is not taught. It is played into existence slowly over time, it needs time and space to bloom. And there is something deeper still. When adults choose to protect a child's right to play, when they give a child time without agenda, space without surveillance, freedom without expectation, they are doing something no policy document can fully capture. They are saying, in the most tangible way possible: we see you. We trust you. We believe in what you are becoming, even before you know what that is. That is not a soft idea. It is the foundation of everything.
What The Made In Play Is Asking
This is why the Made in Play Summit, hosted by NDTV and EkStep Foundation through Bachpan Manao, matters. It is not a celebration of childhood nostalgia. It is a reckoning: a serious, evidence-based argument that India has misclassified play as reward and nice to have when it should have been treating it as infrastructure. Bachpan Manao is already a community of over 100 collaborators across the country working to ensure that every child between zero and eight experiences a joyful, play-filled, nurturing early childhood. Made in Play brings this effort and conversation into everyday life in a relatable way for every caring adult. And it is an open invitation to” make play” your own.
The ask is not complicated. Give a child thirty minutes of unstructured time everyday. Open your mind and heart and ask where play lives in the systems you are part of, not as a reward, not as a break, but as a core input. And if you work in policy, education, media, philanthropy, or business: ask what it would mean to treat play with the same seriousness we treat any other form of national infrastructure. Because what India builds in the next twenty years depends, more than we have acknowledged, on what we protect in the first eight of a child's life. That is the argument the Made in Play is making. It is a long overdue one.
(About the Author: Deepika Mogilishetty is the Chief, Policy & Partnerships for EkStep Foundation. She leads the foundation's work on early years leveraging the power of networks and narratives to bring focus and attention to the growth and development of children in the early years.)
