New Delhi: Abuse of the elderly doubled in 2014 from the previous year, according to study by HelpAge India, the NGO. The study also revealed that 50 per cent of senior citizens it surveyed reported that they had personally encountered abuse.
The study, titled 'State of Elderly in India', also paints a grim picture of the economic state of India's senior citizens, saying 50 percent of them live below the poverty line.
Among the senior citizens surveyed for the study, the number of those who said they had been abused grew from 23 per cent in 2013 to 50 per cent in 2014. A majority of the cases of such abuse happened at home, with the finger pointed at daughters-in-law 61 per cent of the time at sons in 59 per cent of the instances.
Of those who said they had been abused, 41 per cent said they didn't report it to the authorities because they did not want to shame their own family members.
Sonali Sharma, Head of Communication, HelpAge India, puts things in perspective, "It's a generation that neither the government nor the families want to invest in, as they feel they will get no dividend out of it. Life expectancy is increasing, so from 60 to 90 years of age people are living without a pension."
The government spends 0.032 per cent of its GDP on pensions, and this covers only 25 per cent of the population. This is compounded by sub-par implementation of laws aimed at protecting the elderly, says the report. The elderly were also pegged as India's fastest growing population demographic, expected to cross 324 million by 2050, an increase of 270 per cent over current levels.
A number of cases present themselves in homes for senior citizens. For instance, 85-year-old Baldev Raj, who lives in the HelpAge India facility in Delhi, subsists on the Rs 1500 pension he gets, along with the Rs 2000 that his daughter sends him every month. "Our children left us, so I came here. I am very happy here. No one wants to live alone in his old age," he says.
While some senior citizens living in old age homes expressed unhappiness over their children's lack of desire to live with them, other said they were better off living on the generosity of NGOs than on borrowed love.