Caring for the elderly

For millennia in the past, joint family system remained enviable characteristic of Indian society. But the constraints of modern mechanical life have made their first onslaught on that gift and now we are fast shifting to nuclear life. Nobody can arrest the time and tide and we have to move with the changing world. But notwithstanding the new culture and lie style, it is also important that we do not leave our elders and aged parents uncared for and abandon them to the Social Welfare Department. In old age, they need care, love and sympathy, which essentially family members can provide. The President has made a very important point while speaking at a function for National Award for Senior Citizens in New Delhi recently. He said that it was their generation which had built the modern and vibrant India which we are enjoying today. How unfortunate that economic growth, urbanization and migration of youth should have deprived the elderly of love and care. This imbalance needs to be corrected.
The question of caring for the elderly and providing them a life of comfort, dignity and pride will become more and more stringent with the passage of time for the simple reason that in next fifteen years the population of elderly people in our country will jump from 7.66 crore in 2001 to 17.32 crore in 2026. In next 15 years, more than half of India’s population is likely to be less than 40 years of age. It means that the number of elders will increase sharply. And if the present nuclear family system continues without any change, then there will be a huge population regularization problem. For protecting the rights of elders, we have two legislations at the moment. One is The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, which has made mistreatment of parents a penal offense punishable under law. The second is the “National Policy for Senior Citizens, 2011” based on factors like demographic explosion among the elderly, changing economy and social milieu, advancement in medical research and high levels of destitution among the elderly rural poor.
The elders are facing serious problems, the most distressing one being loneliness forced upon them. It was this generation of elderly people who worked hard and for their entire life for transforming India from middle ages to modernity. Our youth below 35 today are much more fortunate to have inherited the comforts of modernity and mechanized life that provides comfort and dignity than the generation of elderly people. More than any legal sanction, it is moral, ethical and humanistic values that must come to work when we are thinking of making the life of the elderly more comfortable and pleasurable That is why the President has been repeatedly advising the society to develop strong moral and ethical system for transforming society into a caring and considerate modern society, and that would be in line with enviable facets of India’s age old civilization.  The true test of high standard of a society lies in the way its senior citizens, elders and aged people are treated and supported. In Western countries, soon after finding that the youth of today have no time to spare for their parents and elders, the situation led to reinforcing the programme of creating old-age homes for elderly persons. We, too, have some old age homes in some of our cities but the question is of running these homes along scientific, just and humanistic lines that would impart sense of belonging among the old and aged inmates. The quality of old-age homes in our country needs to be improved drastically. The Government should pay full attention to the case of the elders of how various services could become easily accessible to them, like medical, entertainment and recreation, celebration of national days and generation of interest in country’s large scale developmental works. Women form the majority section of elderly population in our country and are largely dependent on their children because very small fraction of our women population is employed in government services. Caring for them is a priority. It is also highly desirable that the elders are provided opportunity for self help and joint small scale enterprise and not depend entirely on their wards or the state welfare agencies.

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