The upside of aging in India

While many Indians still feel responsible for their parents and grandparents, new family structures also offer the elderly greater freedom

Tarquin Hall

Relaxing in the comfort of her large bungalow in Meerut, an industrial town east of India’s capital Delhi, Kiran Chadha, 66, describes how, until just a decade ago, her family would gather at the house on weekends to eat and play cards. “My late husband was the family patriarch and these rooms were always full of life and laughter and children,” she says. “We shared everything together, even our troubles.”

Had tradition endured, Chadha’s eldest son would have been expected to raise his own children under his father’s roof. Instead, his career has taken him to China. His brother, too, has moved away to a villa in a gated community in Delhi’s new suburbs. As such, Chadha’s grandchildren have far less contact with their relatives than previous generations. Her daughter-in-law’s status as a working mum is another radical change.

“It’s the same with many families in Meerut where sons are no longer involved with a family business and have entered a profession and many young women are doing the same,” she says. “Were I to live with them, I would be on my own most days.”

Chadha’s newfound independence does come with some perks, however. Last year she went on a tour of the US by herself. And although she often visits her son’s family in Delhi, her social life now revolves around lifelong girlfriends, many of whom find themselves in similar circumstances.

“Yesterday evening a few of us went for a drive and tried a new Chinese restaurant,” grins Mrs. Chadha. “It’s not something my mother would have been able to do.”

Freedom of retirement

The financially privileged residents of The Golden Estate retirement home in Faridabad, a bustling city abutting Delhi, are – somewhat reluctantly – breaking age-old taboos as well. Retired Major General B.R. Barshar, 84, who comes to the buffet lunch in the canteen dressed in a suit and cravat, says that he and his wife tried living under his son’s roof, but weren’t happy.

“We don’t know anyone in the place where they stay,” says Barshar, who complains that grandparents are often taken advantage of as glorified child carers. “Here we have a wonderful community. We are surrounded by people with common interests and we can share our life experiences together.”

Ties to family remain extremely strong, however. Most of the dozen residents gathered at lunch say they chose Faridabad for its proximity to their children. Most also spoke of going to stay with sons and daughters during religious festivals, public holidays and weddings for up to a month at a time – and of coming under pressure to stay on for good.

“For many families there’s still something of a shame associated with not taking care of parents at home,” admits Amit Vaidya, director of The Golden Estate, a company developing retirement homes across India.

Tradition remains strong

Indeed, there’s plenty of empirical evidence and data to suggest that while Vaidya’s growth figures for the Indian retirement industry are justified, the vast majority of middle-class joint families intend to remain living under one roof – or at least in close proximity to one another – while relying heavily on India’s ever plentiful supply of cheap “domestic help,” or servants, to take care of daily chores and cooking.

Ravinder Kaur, professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, says she would not dream of “shunting off” her father, who is 88 and in a wheelchair, to “some home.”

“There remains a great sense of obligation and duty in Indian society to the elderly and I don’t see that going away,” she says.

HSBC’s latest Future of Retirement Program report supports Kaur’s view, finding that India is “unique in many ways, with our respondents confounding a number of global findings.” Some 84% of those surveyed said that living near their children was “important” and that Indians, “are the most likely among the countries surveyed to see themselves living with their children in later life. A massive one in three Indians prefers this course of action.” That’s more than twice the global average.

A United Nations population aging report published also found that roughly 80% of the elderly “co-reside with their spouse and children and in some cases with other relatives … In effect, the family home is the preferred place to live in old age.”

If Modi’s economic miracle doesn’t happen, then we are going to have a double whammy Jayati Ghosh

Crucially, the same UN report states that almost three quarters of “all elderly say that they are fully or partially dependent on others to meet all economic needs.” These findings, says Kaur, support her view that “the Indian joint family will continue to pull together.”

Nevertheless, going by current trends, there can be no doubt that traditional values of mutual inter-generational support crumble in the face of economic hardship. Indians have “amazing survival instincts,” concedes Jayati Ghosh, professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi), but the lack of planning remains “frightening.”

Today, of the one hundred million Indians over the age of 60, 90% must work to survive. Fifty-five million go to bed hungry, according to HelpAge.

“If Modi’s economic miracle doesn’t happen, then we are going to have a double whammy,” says Ghosh, who stresses that the middle classes are starting to save less than previous generations. “We’ll have tens of millions of people who won’t be able to support their parents and there’ll be no healthcare, no pension to speak of, certainly no state-run homes. We need to start building a safety net now.”

Read parts one and two in this three-part series

The upside of aging in India

While many Indians still feel responsible for their parents and grandparents, new family structures also offer the elderly greater freedom

Tarquin Hall

The upside of aging in India

While many Indians still feel responsible for their parents and grandparents, new family structures also offer the elderly greater freedom

Tarquin Hall

The case of the writer who fell in love with India

India’s “missed call” economy

Closing India for foreign business

Plugging the leaks of time