A five day long meeting jointly organised by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and Economic Social Research Council (ESRC), part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) was held in Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh to develop age friendly environments in UK-Indo collaboration. Participants included leading age experts from UK and different parts of India including Calcutta Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology: Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India.
The purpose of the meeting was sharing of research findings to build age friendly cities and communities in India and UK with improved policies, services and structures that enable senior citizens to age actively. The meeting aimed to devise methods for developing supportive communities for senior citizens with access to good health, adequate security and social participation. Experts tried to identify the common areas of difficulty of senior citizens in terms of housing and home, transport and mobility, respect and feeling valued, inter generational support and social participation.
UK Principal Investigator and Associate Professor of Heriot Watt University Dr. Ryan Woolrich said, “We have developed guidelines from experience of senior citizens in different cities and neighbourhoods of UK to create supportive environments and aid in intervention in neighbourhood, cities and national levels. It is important to implement these guidelines and build cross-country partnerships while working closely with policy makers and practitioners. We regularly conduct knowledge cafe’s, workshops and interactive sessions and work on the feedback from elderly to shape services they would be happy with. We want to ensure that all possible resources are directed towards age friendly environments in India and UK.”
India has a growing ageing population and though families are still the primary caregivers, disintegration of joint families and migration of children to other cities make lives of elderly challenging and dependent on communities and available social services. CMIG Chief Functionary and Age Scientist Dr. Indrani Chakravarty said “Our research shows old age homes are never perfect substitutes for elderly and they prefer enjoying ageing in their own places. But many senior citizens feel that though services like health, utilities and transport exist, more needs to be done to make them elderly friendly. With the guidelines from the study in UK neighbourhoods, we will conduct series of similar workshops, knowledge cafe’s and interactive sessions in Kolkata to reach out to the service providers of the city and make it more elderly friendly.”
CMIG conducted qualitative research with the elderly and found lack of satisfaction among them in terms of waiting in queues in hospitals or nursing homes, getting up and down from city transports, paying bills, walking up stairs in old houses etc. With the shared knowledge and expertise from the meeting, CMIG will embark on a long term initiative to work towards more supportive environments for the elderly.
The meeting converged to the conclusion that addressing needs of senior citizens across different social, cultural and urban settings is instrumental to build policies, programmes and interventions that will improve quality of life in old age.
