Caregiver Support

India Is Finally Talking About Caregiver Standards — Here’s What’s Actually Being Proposed

On 5 August 2026, NITI Aayog released a report called Reimagining Care: Strategies for Empowering Caregivers in Viksit Bharat@2047. If you’ve ever tried to hire home care for a parent and had no real way to check whether the person coming into your house was actually trained for it, this report is about exactly that problem — and it’s worth understanding what it does and doesn’t change.

What the Report Actually Recommends

The headline recommendation is a National Caregiver Council — a body that would regulate and accredit caregivers nationally, the way professional councils already exist for doctors or nurses. Alongside it, the report recommends a national training and certification framework, so “trained caregiver” means something consistent wherever you are in India, and a caregiver registry, giving families a real list to check against instead of trusting a business card or a WhatsApp forward.

Taken together, these would be the first serious attempt to make caregiving in India a recognised, checkable profession rather than an informal arrangement families piece together on trust.

Why This Is Coming Up Now

India’s elderly population was around 149 million in 2022 and is projected to reach 347 million by 2050, according to the India Ageing Report 2023. That’s a near-doubling of exactly the population most likely to need sustained home or institutional care — and today’s caregiving workforce, largely informal and unregulated, wasn’t built for that scale.

What This Isn’t — Yet

It’s important to be direct about this: the report is a recommendation, not a law. There’s no announced timeline for a National Caregiver Council to actually exist, no council has been formed, and no certification framework is operating today. If you’re searching for home care for a parent this month, there is still no official accreditation body to check a caregiver or agency against — that’s precisely the gap this report is proposing to close, not one it has closed.

Government reports of this kind can take years to become policy, and some never do. It’s worth watching, but not worth waiting for.

What Families Can Do Today, Without a National Standard

Until something like a national registry exists, the checking still has to be done by you. A few things that genuinely help:

• Ask for references you can actually call — not just a name, but a phone number for a previous family who used this caregiver or agency, and actually call them.
• Ask to see training documentation, not just hear about it. A reputable agency can show you what training a caregiver completed and when, not just tell you they’re “experienced.”
• Start with a short trial period rather than a long-term commitment upfront, especially for live-in arrangements — a few days tells you more than any interview.
• Ask direct questions: What happens in a medical emergency? Who do I call if something feels wrong? What specific training do you have for [your parent’s specific condition]? A vague answer to any of these is worth taking seriously.

None of this is a substitute for national accreditation, and it shouldn’t have to be. But it’s what’s actually available right now, and it’s better than assuming trust where there’s no way yet to verify it.

Continue Exploring

This is part of our Caregiver Support series. If you’re trying to work out what kind of care your family actually needs right now, see How Care Needs Change Over Time. For what elder care in Mumbai involves more broadly, see our Elder Care guide.

If this helped you know what to ask before hiring care, there’s more where this came from. Subscribe for plain-language guides on caring for a loved one with serious illness, written from Mumbai for families anywhere. Have a question this guide didn’t answer? Send it in — sam-bhava reads every one, even though it can’t offer individual medical advice.