Both cramped and offended: Russia still lacks kindergartens

The network edition "Project" has published a large study of the accessibility of kindergartens, which visually illustrates "how the government sets itself tasks, and then cannot fulfill them and comes up with workarounds".

Back in May 2012, President Putin promised to provide every Russian child with a kindergarten place and included such an order in the list of his "May decrees". In the eight years that have passed since then, the decree has been formally executed, and officials have reported on the full implementation of the decree: 70 regions have reported on the full implementation of the decree, eight more - on the availability of kindergartens at the level of 95 to 99%.

Therefore, in 2018, a new decree is issued, now on "the availability of kindergartens for children under three years old", from which the Demography national project was launched.

However, in fact, the deficit of kindergartens was not eliminated, but the existing kindergartens were overcrowded: about 450 thousand children, according to the publication, attend kindergartens in excess of the normative places - that is, contrary to sanitary standards, and about 50 thousand children, mainly in big cities are waiting in line. Moreover, such a picture is observed mainly in new districts, the authorities of which simply do not have the money for the construction of social facilities, and formally they cannot put pressure on developers.

Children of the Moscow region suffer the most in this sense: in the Moscow region, over 30 thousand people are enrolled in kindergartens in excess of the sanitary standard. There, the load on educators has also grown significantly: if before the "May decrees" there were 10 children per educator in this region, then after their "implementation" - 15.

In total, the deficit affected 51 constituent entities of the federation, of which in 34 regions it is above 10%, and the region with a traditionally high birth rate, the Caucasus, is "in the lead" here, as well as the poorest Siberian regions, such as Tyva, for example, where the shortage of places reaches 30%...

The publication notes that at the end of 2018, more than 1.3 million children were expected in the children's garden, mainly from large cities: Barnaul, Vologda, Kazan, Kirov, Krasnodar, Samara, Sochi and Yakutsk. At the same time, practically in all rural settlements and small towns of Russia there were no queues for kindergartens and there are no queues.

Another consequence of this state of affairs is the situation with female employment, which, despite the provisions of the national project “Demography”, is practically not improving. Its growth is extremely insignificant, so, for example, in the Moscow region, from 56%, the number of working women with preschool children has risen to only 58%. The same is true in other regions, and in those where this indicator was traditionally low, it remained so. So there is no question of the desired career growth for women.