Increasing consumption, decreasing support: a multi-generational study of family relations among South Indian Chakkliyars

This article looks at intergenerational relations in two Chakkliyar neighbourhoods in rural Tamil Nadu. Post-1991 economic changes, together with longer-term changes in the rural economy and state policies, have significantly widened the customary ‘needs gap’ between younger and older generations by expanding the needs and aspirations of younger generations both absolutely and in comparison to the perceived needs of older people, whilst not providing them with the means to meet those needs. The declining demand for agricultural labour has not only constrained sons’ capacities to meet the needs of both their conjugal and natal families, but also severely undermined older people's livelihoods as they compete with younger people for agricultural work. The cause of the elderly Chakkliyars’ tenuous subsistence lies not with negligent sons but with the way their vulnerabilities are built into the structure of the economy, society and polity

Aging, work and the demographic dividend in South Asia

Much current interest in South Asia's population structure focuses on 'the working generation' (aged 15-60) and particularly on the 'youth' who could potentially deliver a 'demographic dividend', thereby solving the conundrum of population ageing in developing economies. In contrast to this idea and the related one underlying a wide range of development strategies, that reductions of poverty at younger ages will have a meaningful impact on poverty in old age, this paper will demonstrate, first, that older people’s paid and unpaid work is needed to realise the demographic dividend, second, that older people already play an important role in reducing family poverty and sustaining national economies and, third, that only age-specific policies can address poverty in old age

Risk-talk: the politics of risk and its representation

Looking at the concept of risk from a cross-cultural perspective, the contributors challenge the Eurocentric frameworks within which notions of risk are more commonly considered. They argue that perceptions of danger, and sources of anxiety, are far more socially and culturally constructed – and far more contingent – than risk theorists generally admit. Topics covered include prostitutes in London; AIDS in Tanzania; the cease-fire in Northern Ireland; the volcanic eruptions in Montserrat; modernisation in Amazonia; and the BSE scare in Britain

Stigmatised, marginalised and overlooked: health, later life and gender in India and the United Kingdom

Dominant discourses and conceptual frameworks tend towards stereotypical understandings of what ‘the issues’ are for older people. This forces research, policy framing and everyday discourse down predictable pathways. These stereotypical discourses on old age locate health in the body, in access to health practitioners and in being cared for. This chapter will challenge these stereotypes by demonstrating how a focus on what older people do, that is not pre-determined by ageist thinking, produces a broader understanding of what determines health in later life

India fights for a pension: a campaigning success story

Penny Vera-Sanso explores the successes that the Right to Food Campaign and others have achieved in pushing for pensions and greater security for older people

The health costs of bolstering the Indian economy

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

Ageing, poverty and neoliberalism in urban South India

Research undertaken in the low-income settlements of India’s fourth largest city, Chennai, has uncovered the contribution that older people make to family, society and economy. By situating people at the centre of a study of urban poverty and focusing on what older people do, rather than on what they need, the study has uncovered older people’s contribution to the economy, to social reproduction and to the care economy. The backward linkages of older people’s work links the rural economy, where fifty percent of India’s working population are engaged, to the urban economy. By making up for shortfalls in government social and physical infrastructure, older people have released women into the work force and have themselves provided low-cost inputs to industry and low-cost services to the urban population, thereby buttressing the city’s role in the global economy as an IT and manufacturing centre

Modeling intergenerational relations in South India

Economic models of intergenerational relations in developing countries revolve around the idea of a contract: parents look after the young in return for support in old age. Using comparative data on intergenerational relations amongst the poor in rural and urban south India I argue that it is unwise to base policy measures on a model that cannot capture the complex and shifting patterns of family relations