Revision summary
Active ageing is a global health-and-participation goal with local delivery. India’s longer lives and changing families make it a domestic policy issue. Care of the elderly falls on women by kinship rule. Male migration and informal paid care deepen that skew. Without pensions and shared care, active ageing is women’s extra shift.
Model answer
Introduction
Active ageing has become a glocal goal because longer lives, shrinking families, and global health talk now meet local kinship. Yes, elderly care in developing countries is disproportionately gendered. Daughters-in-law and daughters do the body work.
Body
Why a glocal goal
- Global: WHO and UN frames treat ageing as a development issue of health, work, and participation, not only as a rich-country hobby.
- Local: India is greying while pensions are thin and the joint family is changing, so ‘active’ is a policy hope against a care crisis.
- Glocal means the slogan travels; the means are NFSA, pensions, and neighbourhoods, not Scandinavian wards.
Gendered caregiving
- I agree. Patriarchy assigns care to women as an extension of Seed-and-Earth domestic duty.
- Sons inherit; women nurse. Migration of men thickens the daughter-in-law’s load in villages.
- Paid geriatric work is also female and informal, underemployed and unprotected, the same informalization seen in the wider labour market.
- Developing-country welfare is household-based; the household is a gender factory.
Why
- Honour forbids sending parents to an institution even when women already do a double shift.
- State care is residual, so the ‘family’ in policy is a woman.
What active ageing needs
- Pensions, health, and men’s share of care, or the goal will mean busy grandmothers, not equal ageing.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD G[Global ageing talk] --> L[Local thin pensions] L --> A[Active ageing goal] P[Patriarchy] --> W[Women as carers]
Conclusion
Active ageing is glocal because demographic ageing is global while care remains local. Elderly caregiving in developing countries is disproportionately gendered because patriarchy and thin public care dump the body work on women.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Write a note on G.S.Ghurye's Indological perspective of understanding Indian society.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2018 · Q1(a)). View answer →
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Does joint family solve ageing?
It can shelter. It usually assigns the labour to women.
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Is active ageing only about gyms?
It should mean health, income and voice, not only fitness ads.
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