Why so many of India's young social workers are ending up in elder care
There is a specific problem in Indian welfare that almost no institution was originally designed to handle, and it has quietly become one of the largest single loads carried by the country's young social workers . That problem is abandonment of the elderly. The Longitudinal Ageing Survey of India, published by the International Institute for Population Sciences, estimates that around 18 million people over the age of 60 in India are homeless. Different surveys produce different figures, but the order of magnitude is not seriously in dispute. What is in dispute is whose job it is to do anything about them. For a long time in India, the answer was the extended family. Elders lived in joint households with their children and grandchildren, or in the home of a sibling or cousin, or in the care of a daughter-in-law. That system was never written into policy, but it functioned as the country's main welfare programme for older people for a very long time. It is now under real pressu...