As India grows older, a secret shame emerges

They were found in gutters, on streets, in bushes. They were boarded on trains, deserted in hospitals, dumped at temples. They were sent away for being sick or outliving pay-cheques or simply growing too old.

- MATT SEDENSKY

Avanish Kumar offers a man living on the street in New Delhi a ride to a home for the aged. India has seen a rise in older people abandoned by their families.

By the time they reached this home for the aged and unwanted, many were too numb to speak. Some took months to mouth the truth of how they came to spend their final days in exile.

“They said, ‘Taking care of him is not our cup of tea,’ ” says Amirchand Sharma, 65, a retired police officer whose sons left him to die near the river after he was badly hurt in an accident. “They said, ‘Throw him away.’ ”

In its traditions, in its religious tenets and in its laws, India has long cemented the belief that it is a child’s duty to care for its aging parents. But in a land known for revering its elderly, a secret shame has emerged: A burgeoning population of older people abandoned by their own families.

This is a country where grandparents routinely share a roof with children and grandchildren, and where the expectation that the young care for the old is so ingrained in the national ethos that nursing homes are a relative rarity and hiring caregivers is often seen as taboo.

But expanding lifespans have brought ballooning caregiving pressure, a wave of urbanization has driven many young far from their home villages and a creeping western influence has begun eroding the tradition of multi-generational living.

Courtrooms swell with thousands of cases of parents seeking help from their children. Footpaths and alleys are crowded with older people who now call them home. And a cottage industry of non-profit for the abandoned has sprouted, operating a constantly growing number of shelters that continually fill.

This is one of them.

The Saint Hardyal Educational and Orphans Welfare Society, known as SHEOWS, houses about 320 people on 6.5 hectares of land in this small north Indian city. Nearly all of them were abandoned by their families.