India’s elderly: fend for yourself

Increasing economic pressure is leading to crumbling traditional family structures, as parents and grandparents are forced to look after themselves

Tarquin Hall

For India’s poorest, like 70-year-old Shakuntla, a widow living in a village three hours to the east of India’s bustling capital Delhi, the worst is already a reality. Her son, she says, refuses to provide for her and doesn’t visit for months on end.

“He lives in the city somewhere but sends me nothing,” she complains, as she tends to a fire of broken twigs in the mud hut that she and her daughter call home. Neither is the Indian State providing her with anything resembling a retirement income.

Shakuntla, who is categorized as living below the poverty line, is eligible, along with around 20 million other Indians over the age of 60, to a state pension of just 200 rupees ($3) a month. Free healthcare is another apparition that the Indian state claims to provide but consistently fails to deliver: the nearest hospital, which, like most in India, charges for medicine, is 20 miles (32 km) away. With no subsidized public transport available, paying for the journey along bone-rattling roads is not an option.

“If my neighbors didn’t give me food, I’d starve,” says Shakuntla, who is blind in one eye yet works as a casual farm laborer, earning around 50 rupees (70 cents) per day. The residents at the Gharonda Old Age Home, a drab home for the elderly in Delhi that relies on charitable donations for 100% of its funding and is forced to turn away applicants on a daily basis, regale visitors with more harrowing stories of neglect, validating the repeated warnings of HelpAge, a leading charity, that the traditional imperative to care for elders in India is being eroded.

Tears course down the cheeks of Vimla Devi as she describes how her children threw her out onto the street. Ashok, a frail man of 69, speaks of beatings at the hands of his son, and a daughter-in-law who refused to wash him.

Breakdown of family bonds

“We’re seeing more and more incidents of this kind – neglect, abuse and complete exclusion,” says Manjira Kurana, country head, HelpAge.

“Rural India is in crisis, with holdings fragmented to the point where few families can sustain themselves. India’s young are moving into the cities in search of work, and the economic pressure means they don’t send back much to the parents … Amongst the poorest parts of society there can be no doubt that urbanization is causing the joint family to break down into the nuclear family.”

However, for the so-called “middle class” – a broad term that currently includes approximately 300 million Indians, most of whom live in urban centers – the picture is more complex, and perhaps offers some grounds for optimism.

New family structures also come with perks for the more affluent elderly, as a forthcoming article in this three-part feature on retirement in India shows. Read more next week

India’s elderly: fend for yourself

Increasing economic pressure is leading to crumbling traditional family structures, as parents and grandparents are forced to look after themselves

Tarquin Hall

India’s elderly: fend for yourself

Increasing economic pressure is leading to crumbling traditional family structures, as parents and grandparents are forced to look after themselves

Tarquin Hall

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