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Spotlight on seniors

With an ever-rising number of senior citizens in the country, and a specific policy for their welfare yet to be put in place, this piece of news looks like a ray of hope for our elderly.

The Agewell Foundation, a voluntary organisation working for senior citizens for the last 12 years, has just been granted special consultative status by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC).

This makes the Foundation — which has a consortium of over 1,500 NGOs and 6,500 volunteers spread across 540 districts of India — the first Indian voluntary organisation working in the sector to be awarded the status.

So what does it entail? Explains Himanshu Rath, the Foundation founder, “This is for the first time that 80 million Indian older people (out of the total 600 million senior citizens in the world) are being given due recognition for their needs and rights. This status would bring focus to the condition of old people in India, help advocate for their rights, share their experiences with old people from around the world, learn from others' experiences and share our own traditional wisdom vis-a-vis present-day conditions.” This would also lead to “participation in advocacy at international forums, including ECOSOC, policy formation and their transparent implementation and also increased participation of the elderly to have a better government.”

ECOSOC, one of the six principal organs of the UN, made the announcement during the regular session of its Committee on Non-governmental Organisations this past week at the UN headquarters in New York. Rath, in NY to participate in the session, states in an e-mail response, “This status recognises the fact that population ageing is a bigger challenge for India, as it is the second-most populated country in the world, and as per UN projections it will be the most populated country in the world by 2030.”

“Some rights,” he says, “may have more relevance in old age than at other times, for example, the right to social security in the form of a pension. Sometimes a right that may have been respected when someone is young may not be well protected in old age, e.g., the right to access appropriate health and social care services.”

With our society increasingly turning youth-centric, this UN gesture, states Rath, “is definitely a moral boost.”

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