Picture a mother standing on a crowded railway platform, her baby crying from hunger, with nowhere to sit and feed them without feeling watched or judged. She ends up doing it anyway, tucked into a corner near a pillar or behind a stack of luggage, because there simply isn't anywhere else to go.
This happens every single day at railway stations, bus stands, hospitals, and public spaces across India. Most of us walk past it without ever really noticing.
For a new mother, feeding her baby should not come with this kind of stress. It is not a small inconvenience either:
- It affects how often a mother feeds her baby
- It affects how comfortable she feels doing it in public
- It affects something as basic as her own sense of dignity while going about her day
A Number That Keeps Climbing
Breastfeeding in the open, often in unhygienic corners of stations or hospital corridors, is not just uncomfortable. Without a clean surface to sit on or a place to wash hands nearby, it becomes harder to feed safely, raising the risk of exposing the baby to dust, germs, and infection, on top of the added stress a mother already carries while feeding in public.
This is exactly the everyday reality our Baby Feeding Centres are designed for. Each one is a safe, private, and hygienic space where mothers can feed their babies without feeling exposed or judged.
A couple of years ago, there were 24 such centres, supporting over 1,18,000 mothers. As a child welfare NGO in India, we have kept expanding this work steadily, and today that number stands at:
- 53 centres
- Across 10 states: Maharashtra, Keralam, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, and Haryana
Chhattisgarh and Haryana are now part of that list too, a sign that this work keeps finding mothers in places it had not reached before.
Wherever Mothers Are, That's Where We Show Up
These centres are not limited to one type of space. They are set up wherever mothers actually need them, including:
- Railway stations and metro stations
- Bus stands and depots
- Government and private hospitals
- Even a temple and a college campus
As an NGO for children in India, we see this as care that starts right from a baby's earliest days, and often, that means looking after the mother first. Many of the mothers using these centres are travelling long distances or coming from communities where access to basic facilities is already limited, which is exactly the gap NGOs helping underprivileged children like us try to close, one small space at a time.
To date, our Baby Feeding Centres have supported over 4,83,235 mothers across the country, up from just over a lakh a couple of years ago. Each of these numbers is a mother who did not have to feed her baby in a dirty corner or feel embarrassed doing something as natural as feeding her own child.
Why We Keep Building More
We know health does not only mean hospitals and medicines. Sometimes it means something as simple as a clean bench and a curtain, giving a mother the privacy she deserves. It is care that goes beyond treatment, and as a child protection NGO in India, we want to keep offering exactly that kind of care. No mother should have to choose between feeding her baby on time and having a safe, comfortable place to do it, and as an NGO helping needy families, closing that gap is precisely what keeps us going.
From 24 centres to 53, and from one lakh mothers to nearly five, the numbers keep moving in the right direction. The real win is smaller than that, though, and it happens every time a mother finds a clean, quiet corner where she can simply feed her baby in peace, without a second thought. That is the kind of change worth building, one centre at a time.