As India ages, a secret shame emerges: Elders abandoned by their children

Atmaram, who does not use a surname and was found living on the street, is transported by ambulance to the Saint Hardyal Educational and Orphans Welfare Society, or SHEOWS, a home for the aged and unwanted, Thursday, April 11, 2024, in New Delhi, India. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

GARHMUKTESHWAR, India — They were found in gutters, on streets, in bushes. They were boarded on trains, deserted in hospitals, dumped at temples. They were sent away for being sick or outliving paychecks or simply growing too old.

By the time they reached this home for the aged and unwanted, many were too numb to speak. Some took months to mouth the truth of how they came to spend their final days in exile.

"They said, 'Taking care of him is not our cup of tea,"' says Amirchand Sharma, 65, a retired policeman whose sons left him to die near the river after he was badly hurt in an accident. "They said, 'Throw him away."'

In its traditions, in its religious tenets and in its laws, India has long cemented the belief that it is a child's duty to care for his aging parents. But in a land known for revering its elderly, a secret shame has emerged: A burgeoning population of older people abandoned by their own families.

This is a country where grandparents routinely share a roof with children and grandchildren, and where the expectation that the young care for the old is so ingrained in the national ethos that nursing homes are a relative rarity and hiring caregivers is often seen as taboo. But expanding lifespans have brought ballooning caregiving pressure, a wave of urbanization has driven many young far from their home villages and a creeping Western influence has begun eroding the tradition of multigenerational living.

Courtrooms swell with thousands of cases of parents seeking help from their children. Footpaths and alleys are crowded with older people who now call them home. And a cottage industry of nonprofits for the abandoned has sprouted, operating a constantly growing number of shelters that continually fill.

This is one of them.

The Saint Hardyal Educational and Orphans Welfare Society, known as SHEOWS, houses about 320 people on 16 acres of land in this small north Indian city. Nearly all of them were abandoned by their families.

One woman spent more than eight years living at a faraway temple where she was deserted by her children. Another tells of a son she loved who forced her out, saying if she didn't leave, his wife would. A man sitting atop a bed with sheets adorned with teddy bears and smiling anthropomorphic mushrooms was left to die on the street, arriving here so starved that he ate 22 rotis, one after another after another.

Birbati, the lead caregiver in the women's building, who does not use a surname, says after years of tending to the abandoned, she finds some of them visiting in her dreams.

"Each of them has a story," she says. "All are sad stories."

Where growing old is new

Wealthy countries have grappled with aging societies for decades, but the issue is only now beginning to ripple in the developing world, where the idea of growing old is still new for swaths of the population.

By 2050, two-thirds of the world's population of people 60 and older will reside outside the world's wealthiest nations. India is projected to see growth among its old that far outstrips that of the young.

Already, the curses of that demographic shift have begun to emerge alongside its blessings. An Indian born just 70 years ago was forecast to live nearly half as long as one today. But longer lives have often brought with them greater medical need and thrust the next generation into economic binds that force them to balance the needs of their parents with the needs of their own children.

By tradition, Indian parents live with a son, who is responsible for their care, though in practice, the work typically falls to women. That remains the norm, but a growing number of older Indians now have absentee children and inadequate help to keep up with expenses or care. Others feel forced to leave homes where toxic feuds fester. And, in the very worst cases, parents are ousted from their home by a child in a dispute over money or in a wits-end solution to incontinence they can't stomach or dementia they can't handle.

Driven from their homes, these elders end up begging on the streets or, if they're lucky, in a shelter like this, where separate buildings for men and women overlook a sun-soaked lawn with towering palms and a fountain ringed by rose bushes. Monkeys crisscross the roof of an on-site hospital while inside, in its small physical therapy room, a doctor tries to coax a patient's arthritic knees to work.

The patient, Rajhu Phooljale, has his black pants rolled up, and around his right ankle, he has tied black thread to ward off evil. He says he is 65, but like many older Indians, isn't entirely certain of his age.

How he ended up here, though, he can't forget.

Phooljale was working as a cook and living with his wife and two adult sons when he was hit by a motorist and left initially unable to walk and permanently blinded. He could not work. His wife left him.

His sons told him they arranged for surgery in New Delhi, far from their home in the country's centre, and when they arrived at the hospital, they told him to sit while they went off to consult a doctor.

"Wait here," they said. But they never returned.

For two or three days, Phooljale stayed on the grounds of a hospital in a strange city in a world that, for a man newly blind, had just gone black. He went hungry and thirsty and broke down in tears. A hospital staffer eventually called the police, who in turn alerted SHEOWS, which picked him up.

It has been about two years since then and Phooljale has not heard anything from his sons. He doesn't even have a photograph of them. He wonders if they think he is dead.

"I nurtured them from the time they were small," he says. "Isn't it their duty to take care of me?"

He clutches the side of his head and sobs as he speaks.

Through the window of the therapy room is a hospital ward full of patients with similar stories and, outside, there are two more buildings with hundreds more.

The scene repeats at three other sites run by SHEOWS and the constellation of other organizations' shelters dotting this vast subcontinent.

Scouring the streets

In New Delhi, about 60 miles and a world away from the dirt roads of Garhmukteshwar, a two-man SHEOWS crew inches an ambulance through the capital's choked thoroughfares, where cows amble beside clusters of tuk-tuks and vendors pile their carts high with perfectly stacked fruit.

On streets overflowing with humanity, there is no shortage of heartache and, with traffic snarled, the men study the streets' edges looking for signs of someone old and in need.

They pull over to check on a shoeless man with a torn shirt lying on the side of the road, and another man who is sitting at the riverbank with all his belongings stuffed in two rice bags.

"Do you have a son?" asks the ambulance's driver, Rinku Semar. "Do you have a daughter?"

Some approached by Semar and his partner, Avanish Kumar, refuse to go with them. Others appear drunk or drugged and are disqualified from being taken to one of SHEOWS' shelters. As an orange sun descends in a hazy sky, they pick up a man named Atmaram whose jeans and shirt are worn and dirty and who drags a sack with a blanket and his other belongings. Inside the ambulance, flashes of red and blue strobes ricochet and the siren buffets a nearby mosque's blaring call to prayer.

Atmaram doesn't use a surname and doesn't know his age. A few white hairs sprout from his nearly bald head, his left eye is clouded by cataracts and most of his teeth are gone.

The ambulance arrives at SHEOWS' newest shelter, where seesaws and swings hint at the property's former life as a school. Atmaram is shown to a shower, where the pool of water beneath him turns brown as a caregiver scrubs his legs with a pink bar of soap. Both men are silent.

The stories of the abandoned are often incomplete, riddled with holes punched by time, their reticence and, sometimes, the fog of dementia. Atmaram is no different and, this night, has no explanation for why he was living on the street. Basic questions, such as whether he has any children, are unanswered.

Some clues drip out in the days to come: He used to make clay pots. He and his brother shared a home with their respective wives. His wife died, then his brother. Then, his sister-in-law forced him out.

"This house is not yours," he says she told him.

His shower is done and Atmaram is given fresh clothes and served a hot meal on a metal tray before being shown to a bed in a communal room. The shelter's staff has repeated this routine many times but none utters what they know to be true: Few who arrive here will ever see their families again.

"They say, 'He'll come back one day,"' says Saurabh Bhagat, the 35-year-old leader of SHEOWS, the organization his father founded. "But almost none of them ever come back."

'How can children do this?'

Though most who are taken in by SHEOWS come from New Delhi's streets and spend time in one of the organization's city shelters, in time most end up here, at its largest site in Garhmukteshwar.

The center's staffers are a stand-in for absent families and are quick with a caring touch or extra helping of food. And as caregivers' years here pass, each amasses memories of cases that haunt them.

The old man whose leg was so infested with maggots he spent a month hospitalized. The woman who looked like a skeleton when she was found shivering in the bushes on a winter day that would be her last. A man with dementia often seen crying but unable to say why.

"How can children do this?" the home's manager, 30-year-old Naved Khan, asks in disbelief.

Each who comes here has a different answer, but similarities emerge. Again and again, they tell of being turned away when their needs grew too great, when finances got too tight or when the strife of a packed house was too much to bear. Men outnumber women. Many are in declining health. Dementia and mental illness are common. Most have outlived their spouse, a crucial line of protection.

Shushila Jain, who is about 80, pushes a plastic chair as a makeshift walker and, looking around the room at so many others like her, believes they are living in what Hindus call Kali Yuga, the worst of times, a period marked by conflict and cataclysm. She raised two sons and two daughters and cared for her husband and in-laws and three grandsons, too. But no one reciprocated as her own needs grew.

"I never thought it would come to this," she says.

Bhagat's father, Girdhar Prasad Bhagat, started SHEOWS two decades ago when he began seeing India's cherished traditions flouted and elderly people left in New Delhi's streets.

He'd heard of people abandoning their parents before, most notably in the northern city of Vrindavan. For hundreds of years, its serpentine maze of temple-lined streets and alleys have drawn widows whose families abandoned them after the death of their husbands left them branded as purveyors of bad luck.

As the elder Bhagat moved through New Delhi's streets, though, he saw something new. A problem that was once concentrated in a single place, driven by religious and cultural issues on society's edges, was now finding a foothold among a broader cross-section of people in a much wider swath of the country.

SHEOWS has taken in 10,000 people since its founding, but there is no reliable tally of India's total population of abandoned elders. In cities across the country, organizations that care for the abandoned say a simmering decades-old problem has grown far worse in recent years.

SHEOWS opened a second shelter, then a third, then a fourth. Similar organizations have done the same, some with the backing of billionaire philanthropists like Azim Premji and MacKenzie Scott.

The problem has only continued to grow.

It comes even as India, now the world's most populous country, has experienced decades of phenomenal growth in which billionaires were made but inequities also deepened.

The backgrounds of many here might be surprising, including academics, businesspeople and professionals. SHEOWS residents are more likely to hail from middle-class families than poor ones.

Still, economics are a major driver of abandonment. Most older people in India do not receive a pension, government assistance or health insurance and families are often looked to for support.

Annapurna Devi Pandey, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research has taken her to homes for the abandoned in her native India, says respect for elders remains ingrained in society, but some must make a difficult choice between caring for their children or their parents.

"The sense of duty," she says, "becomes kind of an existential issue."

Left to die alone

Neatly planted rows of vegetables cut across the Garhmukteshwar property's midsection, a limp Indian flag comes to life with a breeze and a wall along the perimeter is painted with messages of hope.

"Keep Smiling." "Love and Respect Old Age People." "Be Happy & You'll Fly."

Places like this weren't supposed to be needed.

Parliament passed the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act in 2007 to ensure grown children and grandchildren provide for their aged relatives.

India's Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, which oversees the law, has not released data on the number of claims it has received. One mid-sized state, Kerala, said in 2022 that its dozens of tribunals had processed some 20,000 cases since the law's passage, a microcosm of the national total.

Surveys show the vast majority of seniors are completely unaware of their rights under the maintenance act. Even if they do know, many are unlikely to take their kin to court.

Bhagat, the leader of SHEOWS, says he's not aware of a single resident of his shelters who has pursued a case. Many concede their fates and remain protective of the children that have deserted them.

A feeling of acceptance is pervasive here. Those who call this home may have been cast away by their families, but they have been saved from the streets. Comfort comes with the rhythm of reliable meals and afternoon teas and their own quiet prayers. Castes disappear and friendships bloom.

More striking than the gravity of the stories or the weight of the sorrows is the warmth residents exude. Wide smiles spread across weathered faces as hands are pressed together in a sign of welcome or placed on a visitor's head, gently mussing their hair to extend a blessing.

"It's not that they don't miss their families," Bhagat says, "but I've seen a lot of broken people heal over time."

Most who arrive here end up staying several years. Some have been here since it opened.

Tucked in one corner of the center's hospital are piles of folders, one for each resident, stashed in cubbies. Each amounts to an individual's history here, beginning with where they were found.

A woman dumped at a Sikh gurdwara. A man lying in the street. A woman left at a police station.

One pile of folders is of those whose son or daughter came back for them, filled out paperwork for their release and pressed a purple thumbprint on it to make it official. But far more files grow fat and tattered until one final insertion is made, a thin strip of grid paper with the flat lines of an EKG.

It is left unsaid when someone arrives here: More than likely, this is the place they will die.

When it happens, caregivers bathe and dress the dead, then take the body to the river, where they rub it in ghee and set it aflame. No family will come to mourn them and no words of remembrance are spoken.

A bed is freed and, soon, a new resident arrives.

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Matt Sedensky reported from seven shelters for abandoned elders in four Indian cities and interviewed more than 70 exiles, advocates, caregivers and other experts.