The health costs of bolstering the Indian economy

Vera-Sanso, Penny (2015) The health costs of bolstering the Indian economy. Global Ageing: Issues & Action 9 (2), pp. 15-19. ISSN 1729-3472.

Abstract

A study of slum dwellers and street traders in Chennai, India’s fourth largest city, demonstrates that far from being frail and dependent, older people (aged over 60) living in poverty are bolstering the Indian economy. They do this directly through their provision of low-cost inputs to industry and low-cost services to workers and indirectly through taking on younger women’s caring and domestic work thereby releasing younger women into the workforce. Poverty, inadequate public services and insecure, low-paid work in India’s massive informal economy, coupled with the lack of a meaningful pension, is seriously cutting into the health and wellbeing of older people and their families. It forces older people, as well as their families, to bear a level of morbidity, anxiety and pain that better off people, within India and internationally, would consider intolerable.

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