Elderly left in the lurch

CHENNAI: The HelpAge India Helpline at the Police Commissioner’s office in Egmore gets 10-15 calls every day, regarding the old people who are in distress or abandoned by their children and families. “Almost 70 percent of those abandoned are widows, whose sons' families drove them out, because their daughter-in-laws objected,” says R Muthukrishnan, HelpAge Helpline Counsellor, who mans these calls. He has rescued more than 300 elderly destitutes from Chennai's streets this year alone.He also recounts how an elderly women was rescued from the GH bus stop, a couple of weeks after intimated by a concerned passerby. “That lady, Saroja (70), belongs to Hosur and had been brought by her son to Chennai to visit her daughter. Her son had asked her to wait at the bus stop, as he ostensibly went to buy lunch but never returned. Predictably, Saroja revealed that the daughter-in-law had issues with keeping her in their home."According to Muthukrishnan, more than 90 per cent of those abandoned in Chennai are aged between 60-70. While 40 per cent of them are from the middle class and 40 per cent from the lower classes, only 20 per cent hail from the upper classes. “About 63.3 per cent of the elderly are financially dependent on their children and 68.4 per cent feel they are neglected by their families. Because of this financial, emotional, physical dependency, many suffer various forms of abuse that are emotional such as not being talked to, being yelled at or just ignored,” opines Indrani Rajadurai, Special Advisor, HelpAge India. “Physical abuse includes starving or giving them unpalatable food. Most of them take abuse silently, which can cause a great sense of depression. Abandonment is the worst of all.”Dr Lakshmi Vijayakumar, Founder Trustee of SNEHA (suicide prevention centre), says, “Till now, India has had a very low number of suicides among the elderly. But given the increasing changes in the traditionally supportive social infrastructures, this will change. In the next decade, we will see a definitive increase in suicides among the graying population of India,” she says. “Causatives include families going the nuclear way, high pressure careers, inflation and the increasing graying population in the country, and also no state support infrastructure for the elderly,” she adds.