INDIA: 11% of Senior Citizens live alone

NEW DELHI (The Times of India), May 28, 2005:

Sunil Dutt's daughter was staying with him when he passed away. But she usually didn't. Dutt's was a one-man household, and he liked it that way. Like him, close to 8.5 million of India's elderly stay all by themselves or with other old people.

According to Census figures released recently, about 11% of India's 76.4 million people aged 60 and above do not have a person below 60 living with them. This includes 4.9 million females, or 12.6% of elderly women, and 3.6 million males, 9.5% of elderly men. These figures don't take into account those living in old age homes.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is more pronounced in rural areas, where 11.9% of the aged have to fend for themselves. In urban areas, about 8.6% of the aged live alone. This seems to indicate that migration is at least as significant a cause for loneliness in the elderly, as is the growing preference for nuclear families. Therefore, it seems that unlike Dutt, many old people living by themselves do so as a compulsion rather than by choice.

Of the 8.5 million, over 3 million are aged individuals who live without any company at home. More than two-thirds of these, about 2.1 millionb, are aged women living alone, while there are about 900,000 old men faced with a similar situation. Another 5.2 million live in homes where the only company they have is that of another elderly person. Among this lot, the gender distribution is more even with 2.6 million women to 2.5 million men, suggesting that most of them may be elderly couples living on their own.

The 2001 Census data shows that over 134 million of India's 193 million households have nobody above the age of 60. That leaves 58.3 million or 30.2% of all households with at least one elderly person as member of the household.

While 21.3% of all households have exactly one elderly, those reporting two comprised 8.4% of the total. This leaves a mere 0.5% of households with three or more elderly persons each.

The share of elderly in the rual areas (31.6%) is relatively higher than in urban areas (26.6%).

Kerala (38.5%) and Punjab (35.4%) are two states with the highest share of households reporting at least one elderly member, whereas among the states and union territories with more than 100,000 households, Chandigarh (16.4%), Arunachal Pradesh (18.6%), and Delhi (19.9%), reported the lowest share.

Of all the households having a single elderly member, 7.5% ared single-member households. Among the major states, Tamil Nadu with 12% and Jammu & Kashmir with 2.9% of the elderly, afre ranked at the top and bottom respectively in this category.

The overall sex ratio of elderly is 1030 females per thousand males, quite expected, considering the higher female life expectancy. But the sex ratio for single-member households is extremely high at 2300.

Among the major states, Karnataka at 3763 has the highest elderly sex ratio for single-member households while Uttar Pradesh at 937 has the lowest.

By Chirdeep Bagga