What is ‘Ageing’? Discuss the major problems of aged people in India. (2023, 10 Marks)
Ageing is at once a biological process, a demographic fact and a socially constructed status. What counts as “old” varies across societies and periods — which is why the problems of the aged are sociological, not merely medical.
Defining ageing
- Chronologically, ageing is counted in years, but the threshold is conventional. The United Nations recommended 60 as the point of transition (1980); the Census of India uses 60, and the World Health Organization, 60–74. The usual divisions — young-old (60–74), old-old (75–84), very old (85+) — show that “the elderly” are not one category.
- Biologically, ageing is senescence: a continuous, irreversible and universal decline.
- Demographically, population ageing is distinct — the rising share of older persons as fertility and mortality fall.
- Sociologically, ageing is a role transition: exit from the occupational role and a shift from authority to dependence. Matilda White Riley treated age as a structural principle allocating roles and rewards — age stratification — and named structural lag, institutions failing to keep pace with longer lives. Discrimination organised by age is ageism.
Major problems of the aged in India
- Economic insecurity. About 78% of the elderly hold no pension; the UNFPA India Ageing Report (2023) finds over 40% of them in the poorest wealth quintile and 18.7% with no income at all, while the central old-age pension share is still ₹200 a month.
- Health and care deficit. A 2024 HelpAge India survey of 5,169 elders found 54% with two or more non-communicable diseases and only 31% insured, against roughly 31 MD seats in geriatric medicine nationally in 2024–25. The Ayushman Vay Vandana Card (October 2024) gives every citizen aged 70+ ₹5 lakh hospitalisation cover, but daily long-term care remains unprovided.
- Loss of status. Rapid technological change makes the elder’s accumulated knowledge obsolete, dissolving the advisory role agrarian society gave; in nuclear households they lose authority and function together.
- Feminisation. Women form about 58% of India’s elderly and 54% of elderly women are widows, usually propertyless — ageing here is disproportionately a woman’s condition.
- Abuse and neglect. The Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (2017–18) found 5.2% reporting abuse in the previous year, most often neglect and verbal disrespect; sons and daughters-in-law are the principal perpetrators, and only 9% knew of the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007.
Conclusion
Peter Townsend’s structured dependency (1981) reads this list best: the old are made poor, idle and dependent by retirement rules, pension design and absent services, not by their bodies. India’s difficulty is not that people live longer, but that its institutions still assume they will not.