Context to Shishughar Application

Why do we need an app?

As we improve our understanding of ground level creche operations, we realize that this is a deeply data-intensive operation. As of November 2025, we have 23k children enrolled in our creches, and there are millions of rows of data tracking eligible and enrolled children, their attendance, height and weight measurements, growth charts, and referrals to public systems.

At the creche level, we are interested in ensuring supervisors are visiting regularly, safety standards are in place and being checked, and notes from visits for improvements in creche processes are being acted upon.

The Shishughar MIS and application

The core Shishughar database application has been built on Frappe Framework, a full-stack, open-source web framework built with Python and JavaScript. Most of the creche data is updated by creche supervisors, and they use a mobile app built on Flutter as their primary tool. The separate mobile app was necessitated by the requirement of the app "working offline"—since many of our creches are in villages with no internet connectivity.

Both the core database application and the mobile app are available free and open source for any organization interested in using them. Public repos can be found here. We realize that deploying these apps and customizing them will require significant support and effort. Please write to us and we will do our best to guide you.

Reports and Dashboards

The core database application has many reports that our field teams and partners have designed, based on the program needs emerging from the ground. These include analyses of malnourished children, checking the correlation between attendance trends and nutritional status, growth charts for individual children, cohort analyses that track specific groups of children. We also have an operating dashboard for the program at the level of an individual creche, a block, district, state, etc.