Ageing in India

India and its neighbouring countries have a remarkable demographic reality. They are young and ageing societies at the same time. India, with a high population of older persons in absolute numbers, stands out in the Asian region and also in the world as the largest ageing society, being second only to China. These India and Asia region countries are being affected simultaneously by changing socioeconomic structures and wider processes of social change, such as migration, urbanization, globalization, and technological advancements, which are creating constraints on quality-of-life issues of older persons whose numbers are rapidly increasing and, in some countries, faster than that of the general population. In the next couple of decades, some of these countries will have the proportion of older people equal to that of children. It will change the dynamics of society and will have many implications for the quality of life of older people. Viewed from different perspectives of public health, social, gender, legal and from a rights-based approach, the developments in the region, seen in the global context, reveal a lot about the emerging ageing scenario to which this chapter pays attention. Questions about health and social care, empowerment issues, mental health and well-being, and civil society responses, along with government initiatives to provide a better life to older persons, are becoming pertinent, quite like the global scenario. It is imperative that countries in the region, including India, plan for their rapidly rising ageing populations in an unprecedented way in this century and bring out programmes and services which meet their vast, heterogeneous and growing needs in changing socioeconomic environments. This chapter focuses on some of these emerging issues and suggests a way forward to integrate ageing issues in the overall national, regional and global context within the framework of healthy ageing that is dominating the discourses in this century and encourages us to think of older people as an asset and not a burden.