Ageing in Isolation: The Care Crisis of the Middle-Class Aged in Kolkata

Abstract

Loneliness and the care crisis together constitute a new menace troubling middle-class elderly citizens in urban India in recent decades. The breakdown of the traditional intergenerational family care system and a modernity-induced “rationalised life” of the urban middle class, while negotiating the unsettling impact of the neoliberal order, are the root causes of the crisis. The middle-class urbanites consciously check fertility, adhering to the new norm of single-child families, and take all possible care in bringing up their children. The children disperse to cities across the country and abroad to study and build careers, exploring the opportunities offered by the national and global markets. By the time the elderly couple retire from service, they find their child/children married or settled in a distant city in their new life with their own families. In India, thus, the number of couples living alone is ever-growing. When one of the spouses dies, the surviving spouse lives alone in his/her house or shifts to old age homes in the last phase of life. This creates a situation of loneliness and a care crisis. Some elderly citizens hire the services of professional caregivers, but that is never a substitute for family care. The crisis deepens when the living members develop health complications and are no longer in a position to take care of themselves. The elderly members are thus trapped in a crisis of their own making; the children, too, are stuck in their new and irreversible life away from home. Data for the paper have been drawn from an empirical study of the life of the elderly neighbourhoods in Kolkata and secondary sources.