Aging in India: challenge for the society
- Delhi Ajanta Pub. 1987
- 250p.
This book examines the problems of the aged and aging from three main perspectives: socio-economic, psychological and health and medical. The major questions which have been probed in the book are: what are the demographic implications of the better health and living standard for the aging population? What kind of social status, economic position and health elder people enjoy? What are their major socio-economic psychological and health problems? What have been the effects of modern education, urbanisation, migration of younger members, Women's employment etc. on the conditions of the aged? How the disintegration of joint family and development of materialistic and individualistic out-look affected the aging members of the family? In what way the conditions of aged women differ from that of aged males? Increased scientific interest in the aging and aging problems is a recent development. The demographic shift attendent upon a far higher rate of increase in the aging population than that in general population combined with withdrawal from work, loss of income, declining health and above all gradual disappearance of traditional kinship and family organisation, which once provided the aged security and care, has posed a serious challenge before the society on one hand and made the aged helpless, isolated, and economically dependent on the other These and similar other problems faced by the aging population in India are the major concerns of this book. The book also offers areas of strategic intervention and support to combat the problems of aging and argues for changing the stereotype idea about the aged being helpless and useless in which aged themselves contribute deal as also for the need to engaged in construtive uumunity work.