More kids leaving parents after 18, are we prepared to face the harsh reality, asks Irani

More children are leaving their parents after turning 18 or 20, Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani said on Tuesday, questioning if we are prepared to face the ”harsh reality”.

Speaking at an event organised by an industry lobby grouping CII on caregiving here, Irani said traditionally, the Indian society has held family values, but we are increasingly becoming a country of nuclear and micro families, and also of single parents.

”We have more and more families where children beyond the age of 18 or 20 or even 25, they delink themselves from their parents. That is a harsh reality we are living with,” the Union minister said.

”The issue is: are we preparing for that reality from an economic and socio-economic perspective?” She wondered if we have mapped the need for investments in geriatric care, stating that even though we may be the youngest economy in the world right now, we exactly know the diseases which the population will be afflicted with in the future.

”There was a time when if my parents or somebody spoke about an old age home, there would be a really sharp reaction from the society. That reaction is now diluted. Imagine two generations after us. Do we have the infrastructure for geriatric care, which also matches the purse strings of the population of the future,” she said.

In this context, she asked if we have allocated the necessary investments which can come from either domestic or international investors in geriatric care.

There is a need for the care economy to be looked at as a business case and not merely as a case for emancipation, the minister said, adding that ”you will have more takers for profit than you will have for justice”.

Irani stressed that we should not only focus on the hours of unpaid work put in by a woman in household chores, but also look at other facets of the care economy, including the likelihood of exporting the services as has been shown by the Indian healthcare workers, and also look at the premium which we can charge on it.

With Special Economic Zones coming up, a business case can also be made for adopting a ”cluster-based” approach to extend care services where all the small factories and units avail of subscriptions, she said.