India’s
Social Safety Net Fraying
By Sandip Roy
CA
My great grandparents both died
at our home in Calcutta surrounded by three generations.
When cancer confined my grandmother to bed, the
lady who lived next door came over every day to
help give her a sponge bath. This December, I
sat on the hard plastic chairs of the waiting
room of a Calcutta hospital. A single strand of
lights twinkled feebly around a spindly artificial
Christmas tree propped up against the reception
area alongside a plastic Santa Claus with a badly
stuck cotton wool beard. My mother was undergoing
emergency surgery and while the waiting room was
cheerless, I was struck by the number of people
there just to provide moral support – my
own family, aunts, my sister’s colleagues,
friends, even an old neighbor now living in America
who happened to be in town. No wonder a friend’s
mother, while visiting her son in Silicon Valley,
had commented, “I don’t want to be
sick and die alone in America.”
It’s a social net I take for
granted in India. For the most part it still exists
although it’s getting increasingly frayed.
A recent surprise Bollywood blockbuster told the
story of an elderly couple whose ungrateful children
kept swapping them like unwanted Christmas gifts.
Forced to live apart from each other, utterly
dependent on their thankless sons, they talk to
each other late at night, in surreptitious telephone
conversations. My mother watches it every time
it comes on television.
The Bengali television soap operas that my mother
is addicted to are all about families falling
apart. They follow traditional lines of fissure:
the scheming ultra-modern daughter-in-law comes
into the traditional household and pits mother
against son. For extra pathos the mother occasionally
will have a stroke. The serials are immensely
popular, requiring thousands of episodes to follow
the tangled skein of unraveling families.
But real life is getting uncomfortably close to
celluloid nightmares. Newspapers in India reported
the story of an elderly lady apparently suffering
from memory loss who was found dumped outside
a senior citizens’ center in Delhi with
two apples, a bottle of water and a bag of clothes.
The Indian government is now proposing a bill
to make it mandatory for children to take care
of their elderly parents. If children don’t
at least provide them with a monthly allowance,
they could face five to 10 years in prison and
be fined 1 million rupees.
Meira Kumar, India’s minister for Social
Justice and Empowerment, told the media that her
proposed bill would create an “enabling
mechanism for the elderly to claim need-based
maintenance from their children.”
The latest census figures indicate that there
are now 80 million people in India over the age
of 60. In the next 10 years that number will hit
110 million. With medical advances, people are
not just living longer; they also need more home
care for diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s.
India’s young people, who represent half
the population, are apparently increasingly loath
to provide this care. Part of this is undoubtedly
the rising cost of health care in a country where
medical insurance is still a relatively new concept.
But it’s also about attitudes.
A year-end poll of India’s youth commissioned
by the Telegraph newspaper found that what irritated
young Delhiites most were intrusive parents (41
percent). Seventy three percent of young people
in the hi-tech city of Bangalore thought savings
were for old people and 50 percent thought fashion
meant name brands.
In Calcutta, once a sleepy city where life revolved
around leisurely cups of tea, 2007 will see another
half dozen 60,000 sq. ft. shopping malls sprout
up. A young country is forging ahead into a glitzy
future. The increasingly forgotten elderly sit
in musty rooms, the television shrouded in plastic
dustcovers, lit in the bluish pallid glow of flickering
fluorescent lights.
Not all is lost, however, in the gust of globalization
sweeping across India. The same Telegraph poll
that found India’s young hankering for laptops
and mobile phones also found that 66 percent of
Calcuttans and 43 percent of Delhiites wanted
to earn money to help their family. But over 20
percent also cited “independence from parents”
as their motivation for earning.
When I left for America almost 20 years ago, a
friend’s mother wondered what I would do
from so far away if my parents fell critically
ill. Now I hear about my mother’s friend,
a widow, who is partially paralyzed by a stroke.
She lives alone with a maid in a tiny one-bedroom
flat on the outskirts of the city. My mother says
every time her friend calls she weeps at her own
helplessness. Her son lives across town in Calcutta,
but is rarely able to visit. He is too busy; there
is too much traffic.
In a few days I too will leave India to return
to my life in America. My sister will care for
my mother, even as she juggles her own job and
her children’s homework, drawing up a chart
of her medication so my mother knows which pills
to take after lunch and which ones after dinner.
But my mother is lucky. My old school friend who
is a doctor checks in on her. Her grandchildren
are on hand to make sure she does her exercises.
The chemist down the street sends someone over
to the house with her pills when she runs out.
The social safety net is still holding for her.
I don’t know if I will
be that lucky when my time comes. – New
America Media
