Caring Futures -from Invisible Work to Care Economy
- theZURI
- Jul 31
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 25
A 6-part ZURI-Lever Inaugural Edition...
The Idea - Why This Edition on Care Economy Matters?
What’s the biggest blind spot in our economic thinking? Care!
It powers other economies. It sustains labour markets. It builds human capital. Yet it remains invisible, in data systems, budget allocations, infrastructure plans & policy design. Across countries like India, Vietnam, Philippines in Asia and similar economies across the world, care continues to be uncounted, unpaid, and undervalued, shouldered overwhelmingly by women, and treated as a private responsibility rather than a national economic priority.
This edition begins with India, not only because of the scale of its care investment deficit, but because the-ZURI is rooted in India. As a platform of Indian origin, we start with our home ground while drawing from global patterns. The care economy is our mirror & a map.
Caring Futures is the inaugural edition of the-ZURI Levers, our flagship research driven deep dive series that explores what drives equity, what denies it & what can shift it. This 6-part edition reframes care not as a social issue or welfare concern, but as economic engine, vital to GDP growth, labour force participation, community resilience and intergenerational equity.
It does more than make the case.
It offers a strategic blueprint, combining macroeconomic evidence, global care financing models, frontline innovations, and recommendations to shape Caring Futures across India & the Global South.
The 6 Features in this edition...
🗓️ Launching 14 August 2025 | Two New issues every month
Feature 1
Invisible Infrastructure Underwriting India’s Economic Development (3-part series)
📅 14th August 2025 Unpaid care work, worth over $955 billion annually, is the invisible scaffolding of India’s economy. This trilogy lays out the macroeconomic case for care, scale of India’s care investment deficit, and what’s shifting across countries advancing care as part of their core economic growth strategy.
Integrate care into national infrastructure, employment, and fiscal planning
Feature 2
Eldercare in India - Aspirations Without Architecture
📅 18th August 2025 India is ageing fast — but its eldercare infrastructure is fragile, fragmented, and underfunded. This article provides a policy-ready reckoner of India’s eldercare system, its gendered burden, and the reforms needed to prepare for demographic shifts.
Build a national strategy for ageing with care, inclusion & gender equity at its core
Feature 3
Financing the Future - Global Models of Care Investment
📅 22nd August 2025 From Uruguay’s SNIC to Japan’s universal care insurance, countries are innovating care financing. This feature distils global lessons on how care is being funded and offers financial architecture options for India.
Design dedicated budget lines, pooled public-private funds, and cost-sharing models for care
Feature 4
Care Satellite Accounts 101 - Measuring What Matters
📅 1st September 2025 India’s unpaid care economy remains invisible in national accounts. This article explains what Care Satellite Accounts are, how countries like Mexico and Colombia are using them, and what India must do to institutionalise care in economic planning.
👉 Launch a Care Satellite Account to count and value unpaid work in India’s economic data systems
Feature 5
The Care Workforce - Underpaid, Undervalued, Unprotected
📅 1st October 2025 ASHAs, Anganwadi workers, domestic workers, eldercare aides — India’s care workforce is essential but excluded from protections. This article maps the care labour market and proposes reforms for wage standards, recognition, and labour rights.
👉 Formalise, protect & invest in India’s care workforce, the human infrastructure of care
Feature 6
India’s Path to a National Care Strategy - Building Institutions for a Caring Economy
📅 15th September 2025 India’s care architecture is siloed and scheme based. This article proposes institutional reforms from a national care commission to inter-ministerial coordination, to help India build a unified, scalable, future-facing care economy.
👉 Create a governance and financing roadmap for a national care strategy
Care has long powered our societies, but it’s time to treat it as infrastructure, not a private burden...
The Caring Futures Lever Edition offers the evidence, insight, and imagination to make that shift, not just in theory, but in institutions, budgets, data systems, and workforce design.
This edition is not a ready-to-use policy framework. It is a thinking space, a test bed of ideas, insights & institutional models that leaders can use to explore options, design responses, shape caring economies that are viable, visible, inclusive.
🚀 Explore the full edition and track each release at the Caring Futures Lever Hub
👉 Visit the Caring Futures Lever Hub
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How the ZURI Lever Editions Work?
Each ZURI Lever Edition unfolds gradually, not all at once. Rather than one off content, these are research backed, policy facing deep dives rolled out over 6 to 12 months, with 1– 2 long-form articles released each month. For reading ease, we sometimes divide a long-form article into 2 or more shorter pieces. While published as articles or blogs, Lever Editions are public outputs of active research projects undertaken at the-ZURI and its partner organisations. They are designed to help policymakers, investors, planners & practitioners, aka decision makers, act on equity, with evidence, clarity and context.
