Dr. Kiran Modi

Dr. Kiran Modi has enabled the non-existing before-family and community-based care to function within formal systems, allowing children without parental care to access education, identity, and protection without being pushed into institutions. She did that through successfully lobbying to adapt the law, as well as through initiating multiple community- and family-based foster care units. Complementing this novel approach she also created a national (and beyond) system for empowering care leavers, to become care providers and mentors. In that way she builds up the self-reliance of previously vulnerable care leavers, turning them into a snowball-growing network of mentors.

In India at a time where childcare was based on institutions, and the child was legally recognized only if in biological family or an institution, Dr. Modi introduced and disseminated family- and community-based foster care. To do that she modified the legal system, simultaniously developing show-case community-based solutions. as well as a provided a support for foster families. Moreover, she empowered care leavers to become mentors, basing on their own experience.

Dr. Kiran recognized that children are routed into institutions not because families or caregivers are unavailable, but because systems are unable to formally acknowledge and work with them. Her innovation lies in correcting the rules through which systems recognise care. By embedding guardianship and alternative caregiving arrangements into legal and administrative processes, family and community-based care becomes operable within formal systems rather than existing on the margins.

Once caregivers are formally recognised, children are able to access schooling, examinations, welfare schemes, and identity documentation directly, without reliance on institutions to mediate these interactions. This redesign shifts institutional care from being the default pathway to a measure of last resort, used only when family or community-based care is genuinely unavailable or unsafe. In doing so, it changes the design within the system, making it easier for families and individuals to step forward and sustain care over time.

Crucially, this approach does not depend on expanding services or building parallel care structures. Instead, it demonstrates how targeted corrections at key administrative entry points can realign multiple systems simultaneously. By changing how care is named, recorded, and validated, it unlocks a cascade of effects across education, child protection, and social welfare systems.

Complementing this sector-level redesign, a parallel ecosystem has been built for young people transitioning out of care. Care leavers are repositioned from passive recipients of support to peer-led providers and leaders, creating networks that enable self-reliance, dignity, and collective capacity. These networks extend the logic of recognition beyond childhood, ensuring that individuals who have experienced care are able to participate as contributors within society rather than remaining defined by vulnerability.

India has an estimated 30 million orphaned and abandoned children, representing one of the largest populations of children living without parental care in the world. Despite the scale of this population, the formal child protection system recognises and engages only a fraction of these children. A significant proportion of these children currently live in registered Child Care Institutions, making institutional care the most visible and administratively recognised response within the system.

This mismatch between scale and system response reveals a deeper structural problem. Child protection systems are built around the assumption that families are synonymous with biological parents. When this assumption fails due to death, illness, migration, abandonment, or family breakdown, systems lack the architecture to recognise alternative caregiving arrangements. Extended families, guardians, and community caregivers may exist and be willing to care for children, but they are unable to interact with public systems in a formal, sustained way.

The persistence of institutional care in India is driven not by the absence of family-based alternatives, but by a fundamental design flaw in child protection systems: the state recognises only biological parents as legitimate caregivers. This rule of recognition is embedded across public systems such as education, welfare delivery, and identity documentation, determining which forms of care are administratively valid. As a result, guardians, extended family members, and community caregivers remain structurally invisible, even when they provide stable, long-term care.

Administrative processes reinforce this exclusion. Education systems, including school admissions and Board examination forms, have historically recognised only “Father” and “Mother” as valid caregiver categories. Welfare documentation and identity processes followed similar logics. For children living with guardians, this creates recurring barriers to education access, certification, and services. Families are forced to misrepresent caregiving arrangements or rely on institutions to act as intermediaries. Over time, institutional care becomes the most navigable option, not because it is best for all children in need, but because it aligns with how systems are designed to function.

The result is a child protection ecosystem that unintentionally penalises families and individuals who step forward to care for children, while structurally favouring institutionalisation alone. This design failure perpetuates cycles of separation, instability, and poor long-term outcomes, even as evidence increasingly points to the benefits of family and community-based care.

After observing that child protection systems routinely defaulted to institutional care because they could not formally recognise guardians, extended families, or community caregivers, Dr. Kiran Modi set out to demonstrate a different pathway. Founding Udayan Care in 1994, she combined long-term care practice with selective, high-leverage system intervention, using operational evidence to correct the administrative rules that made institutionalisation the most navigable option. Udayan Care has had sectoral influence in India’s child protection and youth development space, particularly by reshaping how alternative care and transitions to adulthood are understood.

Her first line of action was to establish credible demonstration models that could operate within statutory child protection frameworks. Dr. Kiran developed “Udayan Ghars” (Ghar means Home in Hindi) across 16 states, small, family-like homes embedded within residential communities. Through its “Udayan Ghar” approach—small group homes led by long-term caregivers acting as parental figures—the organization demonstrated that emotionally stable, relationship-based environments lead to better developmental outcomes for children. This helped strengthen a broader shift in the sector toward non-institutional care, aligning with the intent of the Juvenile Justice Act, which prioritizes family-based solutions over institutionalization. Children living in these homes attend neighbourhood schools, participate in everyday community life, and build stable, long-term relationships with their caregivers. Over time, these Ghars functioned as proof points for the state, showing that family- and community-based care could meet child protection standards while supporting education, wellbeing, and long-term belonging.

Alongside demonstration, Kiran institutionalised structured pathways for family reintegration and alternative care. From the late 1990s onward, she empowered with Child Welfare Committees and district-level authorities to systematise family tracing and community mapping. Potential caregivers were identified from extended families or trusted community networks and assessed not only for economic capacity, but for relational stability, willingness, and long-term commitment. This provided a lot of new insights and shifted decision-making toward continuity of care and strengthened the role of families and communities as primary caregivers.

Once children were placed with families or guardians, Kiran prioritised sustained caregiver support and mentorship. Caregivers received psychosocial guidance to address children’s emotional and behavioural needs, along with support to navigate education systems, vocational pathways, and government welfare schemes. Positive parenting workshops and community-based support networks strengthened caregiver capacity and confidence. Support continued over multiple years, particularly through adolescence, ensuring stability and long-term developmental outcomes for children.

As practice revealed that administrative recognition was the principal barrier preventing family-based care from functioning independently of institutions, Kiran intervened directly at the systems level. In 2005–2006, she filed and successfully advocated a Public Interest Litigation in the Delhi High Court addressing systemic exclusion in education documentation. At the time, India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Board examination forms recognised only “Father” and “Mother,” effectively excluding children under guardianship from accessing examinations. On December 19, 2006, the Court directed the government and CBSE to include a “Guardian” category, recognising this gap under child rights protections. CBSE subsequently revised forms nationwide to include Parent/Guardian fields, removing a structural barrier that had affected approximately 30 million children interacting with the education system.

Over the following decade, Kiran’s work aligned with and reinforced a broader structural shift away from large institutional care. Policy frameworks increasingly moved toward family- and community-based care as the preferred standard. This shift was further consolidated under Mission Vatsalya (2022), which reduced the maximum capacity of childcare institutions from 100 to 25 children, governing approximately 9,000 institutions nationwide, and reinforcing smaller, family-like and community-based environments as the norm. Throughout this period, “Udayan Ghars” continued to serve as evidence that such models were viable and scalable within public systems. In 2014, for bringing frame change on various issues Kiran Modi founded the international bi-annual journal on Alternative Care: “Institutionalised Children: Explorations and Beyond” (ICB), focusing on South Asia and is also the Founder of Biennial Conferences, called BICONS, on Alternative Care and family strengthening, focusing on Asia.

Another dimension of Udayan Care’s sectoral contribution lies in normalizing structured citizen engagement in child protection. Udayan Care has mobilized urban professionals as long-term mentors and volunteers, creating pathways for individuals to meaningfully engage with children and youth beyond one-time support. This has helped reinforce the idea that child protection is not solely the responsibility of the state or institutions, but a broader societal commitment. Demonstrating beyond the traditional care systems, Udayan Care has also contributed to expanding pathways for social mobility through education, particularly for young women. Its “Udayan Shalini Fellowship” program supports girls from low-income backgrounds in accessing higher education while providing mentorship, life skills, and identity-building support. This integrated approach goes beyond financial aid to address the broader barriers that first-generation learners face. As a result, the organization has helped strengthen the case for holistic youth development models that connect education with long-term livelihood and agency outcomes.

In parallel, Dr. Kiran extended her system-building approach to youth transitioning out of care. In 2017, she incubated Care Leavers Networks to address the absence of post-care ecosystems. These peer-led networks now operate across 15 Indian states, repositioning care leavers from passive recipients of support to active providers, leaders, and contributors. The model has since been replicated across South Asia, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, indicating continental-level diffusion of the approach and a shift in how care leavers are integrated into society.

Dr. Kiran Modi’s involvement in child protection is rooted in a deeply personal experience of separation and loss that has shaped her understanding of care, belonging, and system failure from an early age. As a child of eight, she was briefly separated from her parents in a crowded public space. Lost on a busy road, taken to a police station, and reunited only after her parents searched frantically for her, the experience left a lasting imprint. Though the separation lasted only a short time, the fear, disorientation, and emotional intensity of those moments stayed with her, informing how she understood childhood, safety, and attachment long after the incident itself had passed.

That early experience became a quiet reference point throughout her life, resurfacing more forcefully years later through a personal tragedy that abruptly shifted her from the world of academic literature into lived reality. Trained as a scholar of literature, Kiran had been immersed in ideas of narrative, identity, and meaning. But personal loss compelled her to confront the tangible consequences of separation and vulnerability in ways that theory could not hold. Around the same time, she observed her son dedicating his modest income to support vulnerable children. This combination of personal grief, memory, and moral clarity led her to conclude that she could no longer remain an observer. She felt compelled to act.

Before founding Udayan Care, Kiran spent nearly a year immersing herself in the citizen sector, visiting various organisations to understand the landscape of social responses to vulnerability. During one such visit to an orphanage, a child approached her, held on to her, and asked simply to be taken home. That moment reactivated her own childhood memory of separation and crystallised her discomfort with the prevailing institutional model of care in India. At the time, large children’s homes were the dominant response, reinforced by legal and policy frameworks that envisioned care in terms of scale and containment rather than relationships. Children were housed in large institutions, often physically and emotionally removed from everyday social life.

These experiences led Kiran to a conviction that would become foundational to her work: that children need family environments, not institutions, and that systems should be designed to preserve and rebuild relationships rather than replace them. This belief informed the creation of her first care model, LIFE, which stands for Living in Family Environment. It also marked her entry into the citizen sector in 1994, when she founded Udayan Care. From the outset, her work was shaped by an insistence that care must feel like care to a child, not like administration.

Over time, Dr. Kiran’s personal insights matured into systemic thinking. Her early discomfort with large institutions evolved into a deeper interrogation of why systems continued to rely on them even when family-based alternatives were possible. Rather than attributing this to neglect or lack of compassion, she began to see institutionalisation as the outcome of how systems were designed to recognise care. This shift from emotional response to structural analysis defines her leadership trajectory. It explains why her work moved beyond building care homes to challenging the legal and administrative rules that determine who is recognised as a caregiver in the first place.

Dr. Kiran’s leadership is marked by reflection, persistence, and a refusal to accept that childhood separation is an unavoidable by-product of poverty or crisis. Her personal experience of loss led her to redesign. She works within systems, identifying the precise points where small corrections can prevent large harms. For her, the question has never been how to manage children without parents, but how to ensure that no system unnecessarily separates a child from the possibility of family, belonging, and continuity.

Dr. Kiran Modi has earned her PhD from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in American Literature and is the recipient of many prestigious awards for her efforts in building Udayan Care, including the National Award for Child Welfare 2014 - India’s highest commendation for a non-profit child welfare organization.