Institutional care in India is considered as the last resort in a society that glorifies filial piety and familial responsibility of family-based caregiving for older kin. While private senior citizen homes and retirement communities are being established in some parts of the country, they cater mostly to the affluent sections of the society. The common people are mostly left at the mercy of a very inadequate number of old age homes run by the state and non-profit organizations. In this study, I discuss three kinds of charitable old age homes: a state-run home in Delhi and two destitute homes run by non-profit organizations, one in Delhi and another in Kolkata. A combination of ethnography and structured interviews has been used for this study which takes into account the spatial arrangement within the homes, the language of control used by caregivers and the unique ways in which care is organized in the homes. The study finds that the three homes depict different caregiving practices corresponding to a different politics of care and interpretation of the needs of the older residents at each of the sites. While analysing the three models of institutional care, the study discusses the concerns with the existing models and also highlights care practices within institutions that embody feminist ethics of care.