Five women employed at Little Buds Day Care Centre, a creche operating on Capgemini's east Bengaluru campus, have been booked for allegedly abusing toddlers aged two to three. Videos that surfaced appear to show children placed inside a washing-machine drum and locked in bathrooms to stop them crying; police say the staff also threatened the children into silence. The case came to light only when a child helpline official received four of the videos and alerted police, who have registered a case under Section 351(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Section 75 of the Juvenile Justice Act, and sent the footage for forensic examination.
Capgemini, which says the creche is run by an external provider, has temporarily closed the facility and said it is cooperating fully with the authorities, calling the safety of its employees and their families its foremost priority.
What makes this land so hard is the setting. This was not a backstreet facility but an on-campus creche — the kind named in offer letters as a benefit, the kind that lets a working parent feel a little less guilty. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act obliges larger employers to provide creches, but enforcement rests on state rules that most states, for years, never notified. As the workplace-inclusion consultant Pallavi Pareek has put it, without them "there is no monitoring — this is why companies get away." No regulation says who independently audits these places once they open, or how often. For children too young to speak, that leaves parents watching for bruises and shifts in mood. Those are not safeguards. They are guesses.
The abuse is alleged and under investigation but the fear it has stirred in every parent who read the headline is real and established.
Sources
Republic World — "Bengaluru Daycare Horror: Five Nannies Booked, Capgemini Shuts Daycare After Videos Show Toddlers Abused At IT Campus Crèche" (July 2026)
IndiaSpend — "Large Employers Are Required to Provide Creches, But Most Don't" (March 2021)
IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute — "Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017: A Right Delayed, A Policy Denied"
Nishith Desai Associates — "Crèche Facility by Employers in India: Rules Notified" — on Karnataka being the first state to notify creche rules (2019)
Mercer — "India Issues Workplace Crèche Guidelines"
