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 pressure. Cities pull younger generations away for work. Nuclear households are the norm in urban India. Marriages happen later and produce fewer children. Older parents, when they can no longer look after themselves, end up somewhere, and increasingly that somewhere is a shelter.

The state has not built out enough capacity to meet the demand. Government old-age homes exist but their coverage is patchy and most are full. Private old-age homes exist for people who can pay for them, but the group being discussed here, people found on footpaths and railway platforms and outside government hospitals, cannot pay. What has filled the gap in many parts of the country is a small set of NGOs, and the people running them are often much younger than you might expect.

Jas Kalra is one of them. He is president of The Earth Saviours Foundation in Gurugram, which operates two shelter homes at Bandhwari and Mandawar on the outskirts of the city. Together they house over 1,300 residents. Most are elderly, most were abandoned, and almost none of them arrive with identification papers. The foundation was started by his father Ravi Kalra in 2008. Jas took over as president in 2021 at the age of 21, four months after starting to learn the work alongside his father, when his father died. He has since personally rescued more than 1,500 people from the streets, reunited over 3,000 with their families where possible, and performed the last rites of around 3,000 unclaimed bodies. The foundation as a whole has cremated more than 12,500 people whose families never came forward.

The scale of that operation is what makes his position unusual for a social worker in his mid-twenties. A residential facility with 1,300 people needs the logistics of a small hospital: three meals a day, medication management, doctor visits, laundry, sanitation, rotating staff. It does not close for holidays. It also does not have a natural funding cycle, because donor interest tends to spike around disasters and drop off during the slow, unglamorous work of everyday care. When there is a flood or an earthquake, money flows. When 1,300 elderly people need dinner on a Tuesday in July, it does not.

Jas is not alone in the broader category of young social workers in India who are running serious institutions rather than campaigns. Neha Arora founded Planet Abled in 2016 to design accessible travel for people with disabilities, after realising her own parents, both with disabilities, could not travel independently in India. Roshni Mukherjee started ExamFear, now Learnohub, in 2011 as a free YouTube channel for Indian school students who cannot afford coaching. Trisha Shetty founded SheSays India in 2015 for gender-based violence and reproductive rights work.

What is specific about the elder-care corner of the sector, though, is that the work is mostly invisible outside the shelter walls. It does not produce photogenic before-and-after outcomes. The trajectory for many residents is not recovery but a dignified end. When Jas speaks about the shelter in interviews, he does not talk about rehabilitation statistics much. He talks about specific residents, and about what it means that his organisation is the last place that will know their name.

There is a straightforward reason young social workers in India are being pulled into this work. The people who need it are appearing faster than older institutions can absorb them, and someone has to open the gate.