India is getting older. Is the country prepared for it?

India still sees itself as a young country, but that is beginning to change. In today's YOUR INDIA column, Santosh Nair writes on the rise of the elderly population, shrinking family support systems and whether India is preparing fast enough for old age.

A woman in her seventies sits on a cot in a small town in Bihar. Her children live in Bengaluru and Dubai. She manages her own meals, her own medicines, her own loneliness. No one in her family has done anything wrong. This is simply what her old age looks like now, and versions of her story are multiplying across the country faster than most Indians realise.

India still thinks of itself as a young nation. For decades, that was true, and it shaped everything from job policy to political attention. But the United Nations Population Fund projects that India’s elderly population, people aged 60 and above, will cross 20 per cent of the total population by 2050, more than double where it stands today. By 2046, for the first time in the country’s history, there will be more elderly Indians than children under 15.

That is not a distant, abstract future. Someone who is 40 years old today will be part of that elderly population in 2046. The India built for a young workforce is, within one working lifetime, going to need to also be an India that works for its old.

Read more: Why does where you live affect your health in India?

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