INDIA: Space for 88-yr-old dad - Court frees widower from rich son’s 4ft-by-8ft coop

. NEW DELHI, India / The Telegraph / Front Page / April 28, 2009 By Ananya Sengupta Shivcharan Walia retired as a rich businessman with a large house and two successful sons, but the 88-year-old has spent the past 10 years in a 4ft-by-8ft room. Wobbly on his feet and unable to stand straight, Walia trudged to the Ghaziabad civil court on April 20 to find himself a lawyer. He had had enough of ill-treatment by his sons and wanted the right to live comfortably in a house he had built with his own money. On April 24, the court passed its verdict on the case of torture and mental trauma brought against his sons by Walia, who lived partitioned off in a passage in the 6,300sqft, two-storey house. The court asked Walia’s younger son Vinod to provide him with his own room — with air-conditioning, a TV set and an attached bathroom — as well as a monthly allowance of Rs 7,000 from May 1. It also instructed Vinod to transfer to Walia the ownership of two of the five shops operating from the premises. Walia, a well-known transporter in his time in Ghaziabad, a town on Delhi’s outskirts, saw his troubles begin when his wife died 10 years ago. He had transferred all his property in his wife’s name, and before her death she had willed it to their sons Vinod, 55, and Amrish, 60. Walia began living with Vinod who, along with his wife, often beat him and even broke his fingers, Walia’s lawyer Vinay Upadhaya alleged. “No one in the family, not even his grandchildren, would speak to him. He had no one to offer him food or medicine,” Upadhaya said. “His condition is very bad. He is perpetually bent. When he came to me for help, he didn’t have a paisa.” The lawyer said Vinod and Amrish, who inherited Walia’s business, owned property worth crores, including the Ghaziabad house and the shops on its premises. Vinod also owns two flats and an office in Geeta Colony in east Delhi and two offices in Noida. According to Upadhaya, Amrish told the court he earned more than Rs 100,000 (US$4,000) a month but claimed he wasn’t financially stable enough to provide for his father. “The sons were very angry at having been summoned to court. Vinod didn’t even talk to his father; after the verdict he walked out without a glance at him,” the lawyer said. “It’s a pity that despite having two sons and three daughters, he needed a court verdict to ensure he had a comfortable life. But the judgment can only get him material comforts; he will always be in need of love.” Upadhaya added that such quick verdicts — it came four days after the case was filed — were not unusual in cases involving negligence or abuse of the elderly. A survey by HelpAge India in 2007, titled “Older Persons Property Victimisation Survey”, had shown that many aged people living with their children in Delhi faced intense pressure to sell their property or transfer ownership to their sons and daughters. Every second elderly person in the city faced harassment over property or admitted to knowing another senior citizen who was being harassed. The survey found that posh south Delhi reported 41.6 per cent of the cases followed by central Delhi (20.8 per cent). In half of these cases, the harassment was inflicted by the victims’ children or children-in-law. Copyright © 2009 The Telegraph