The Government of Odisha should set up a dedicated institute for geriatric care to address old age-related issues.
The measure may help throw more light on the plight of the elderly, but their needs are much more than what the medical institutions can offer. The senior citizens shall feel immensely grateful if ashrams of the kind Rishis of yore established. The State Government may play its role in realising that dream of the second childhood.
How about the country’s high net worth individuals (HNWIs)? The factors triggering the process of physically delinking elderly members of the family are explained away in terms of compulsions of urban life, pushing under the carpet the other factors of duty of the younger generation to the seniors in caring for them, forsaking filial relations, throwing to winds the sense of gratefulness, pursuit of self-interest, disregard to compassion towards the elderly in the evenings of their lives and so on.
Traditionally, an ashram was perceived as a spiritual hermitage or monastery in the subcontinent, of which present territory of India is but a part. Modern avatar namely Vruddhashrama, euphemism for old-age homes, emerging in the country decades ago as selfless service in the matter of caring of the aged inmates has got transformed into a rewarding enterprise, the inmates having to pay the prescribed charges virtually as paying guests. The changeover continues to be an urban happening; the rural folk is yet to enter the system that is growing in rapid strides in cities of all descriptions, including Bhubaneswar.
In many countries of the Western world, the social security system to which the citizens are required to make a token lifelong monetary contribution seems to be working reasonably well, freeing the beneficiaries from worry of depending on their children. Given the fact that nearly 95 per cent of the wage-earning population of the country is in the unorganised sector and a part of the rest covered by pension, millions of the country’s elderly have nowhere to look to for their security and minimum comforts in life.
Only an infinitesimal fraction of the last-mentioned section in the population has the wherewithal to meet the charges collected by most of the old-age homes, their numbers swelling each year in Odisha.
(The writer, who lives at E-237, GGP Colony, Bhubaneswar, works with NSS, CHSE. Mob: 9437616497. The views expressed are personal)