Old Is Not GoldFor the burgeoning population of senior citizens, life is bleak
OPEN SPACE
By Sankar Ray
MUMBAI (The Hindustan Times),
November 28, 2007:
THE POPULATION of old people in Asia, including India and China, is expected to cross 1,249 million by 2050, meaning almost one in every four human beings in the world's largest continent will be old.
This estimate is according to the World Population Prospects: the 2006 Revision of the UN Population Division.
Demographers even in other UN bodies saythe estimate is ‘exaggerated'. The UNFPA exercise in 2002 estimated the total world population of the aged at 605 million - 374 million in developing countries and 231 million in the developed countries. Even going by the UNFPA database of 2002, by 2020 the number of aged in the developing world would go up to around 706 million and 317 million in the developed economies.
The plight of older people is worsening, agree demographers, particularly of those living in rural areas. Another recent UN report - World Economic and Social Survey 2007: Development in an Ageing World - states with concern that "Eighty per cent of the world's population do not have sufficient protection in old age to enable them to face health, disability and income risks". The scenario is worst for the South where about 342 million older people currently lack adequate income security'.
The majority of old people in India are deprived of pension benefits and hence are a burden to their families. The tradition of revering the aged has been petering out in the last five to six decades with the joint family system disintegrating due to economic reasons. The inevitable advent of nuclear families as its outcome brings marked changes in cultural values. Nuclear families opt for reduced family size and modified family structures. And these family patterns have also to contend with the social trauma as well.
Needless to say, the ageing of the population is part of a demographic transition the shift from high to low birth and death rates - particularly in developing countries. People today live longer although child births too have declined by half over the last 50 years.
Younger generations are apathetic towards the joint family system and opt for nuclear families. The proliferation of old age homes is an obvious eventuality although most old-age homes are worse than prisons, at least in India.
The overwhelming majority of older persons in the developing economies are women simply because they live longer than men do. Older women are generally poorer or less literate than men. Factors like discrimination, restrictions on freedom of movement and association and lack of access to financial and legal resources contribute to their exploitation and abuse. For working women things are only marginally better.
The UNFPA executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid referred to an Indian study on the distressed widows among the old, quoting one hapless widow: "I have lived alone since my husband's death seven years ago… my children migrated…they have never bothered to inquire about me...I have no income and hardly any contact with anyone…I will die like this…I have no life and am lonely and frail".
More and more old women, the UNFPA chief said, were abused, more so when they were widowed.
Professor Robin Blackburn in a recent paper, A Global Pension Fund, in the New Left Review, expressed concern that "2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day, with probably the majority of the elderly falling within this category. The poorest 10 per cent of the world population receive only 0.7 per cent of the global income, while the richest command some 54 per cent". Even $1 a day for the adults in many parts of India may keep poverty at bay.
However, political parties and even trade unions in India pay little attention to organising action programmes to protect the aged. Writing essays or presenting papers on poverty or estimation of percentage of people languishing below the poverty line will do nothing to ameliorate poverty.
Rather some NGOs that are often criticised for misusing national and foreign funds help the abject poor fight poverty. Some trade unions, including the ones led by the Left, backed by the media, cry hoarse for pensioners very often.
Furthermore, there are more than 70 associations of pensioners. But the aged - the ‘Living Dead' remain as Thomas Gray portrayed them in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as "mute inglorious", awaiting agonisingly for their end.
Sankar Ray writes on social, political and environmental issues
Copyright HT Media Ltd. 2007
