Old Age Home: An Analysis

               

By Sanket 'old enough to be young' Kambli

"Don't be too hard on your parents, you may find yourself in their place..." wrote the famous English writer Compton Burnett-Dame Ivy
‘Respect your elders’ is what we are all brought up with and often, we tend to define our Indianness with this maxim.
Before introducing you to this topic let us take a look at the build up to this topic:
Life Expectancy is improving.  A silent revolution has occurred in the last 100 years - unseen, unheard, and yet so close. The biggest achievement of the century is longevity. All over the world life expectancy has risen, leading to a sharp rise in the number of Older Persons. When health and education is good, survival beyond age 80 is likely. Especially once a person has survived to, say age 60, survival till age 75 is the average outcome.The joint family system is being broken down due to changesin society and culture.
And often children work far away from where their parents are located. Traditionally having an elderly member was a low-cost affair which isn't the case with todays standards for health expenses.
And as everyone has observed the joint family system is being replaced by the nucleur family system in our society.
This has eventually resulted in the aged parents being left to fend for themselves as their children leave them and get engrossed in the affairs of their own families, after acquiring one. But one thing that goes unnoticed is that in old age, a person becomes tender like a child, and, therefore, he needs to be looked after as a child. This is a situatuion which calls for the need of homes for the aged, and that to open to all sections of the society.
Its a general tendency that, when he is child, then he does not care much about his parents.  But when he himself becomes old, then he remembers that he should get respect. In the case of well off people becoming old, they do not have any food problem but son of a poor father can not earn so much that he can feed his old parents after feeding his wife and children.
There should be a residential ‘Ashram’ where food, water, clothes and medicines can be arranged for these old people.There are 1018 Old Age Homes in India today. Out of these, 427 homes are free of cost while 153 old age homes are on pay & stay basis, 146 homes have both free as well as pay & stay facilities and detailed information is not available for 292 homes. A total of 371 old age homes all over the country are available for the sick and 118 homes are exclusively for women. Kerala has 186 old age homes, which is maximum in any state.
(Directory of Old Age Homes in India, HelpAge India, 2002). A very good commission should be constituted for the old people which should have all the facilities.
For many old aged folks who have nowhere to go and no one to support them, old age homes serve as a safe haven. These homes give them a sense of security and friendship as they share their grievances with others like them staying at the home, making them an unusual family of older people(like in the movie Shararat). Many will still argue that, old age homes are not the solution to the problem, as the best care for an older person is within his or her own family, but I feel unfortunately that is not the reality of the present day scenario.