Report says older people are increasingly bearing the impact of climate change, with heatwaves, floods and droughts adding to perils of poor health, financial insecurity
As elderly people find them the going grim and daunting, particularly the ones without any pensionary benefits or family backing to fall upon in dotage, the prevalent environmental or climate change has added to their agonies compounding in no small measure to make existence both doleful and dangerous. It is not that others with means or normal health conditions are any better placed in the precarity of the escalating cost of living for everything from the cradle to the grave! The only difference is the latter category of people has something to latch on for a decent living! As the quip has it that even dying becomes beyond one’s means.
In India, both the Centre and the states find funneling resources for welfare, a patently consumption or revenue expenditure, becoming intractable so much so that many a political party starts claiming that these must perforce have to be reckoned as development expenditure in so far as they go to meet the dire needs of the weak and the vulnerable to stay in the safe lane of life! Yet the sparse resources so thinly spread meant that their draft on overall allocation of available limited means is too immeasurable to ignore. So, both the national and sub-national dispensations resort to borrowing binges heavily to finance development expenditure entailing humongous capital outlays with the payback onus pushed to posterity even as the interest cost on borrowed funds cannot be pushed under the carpet! The prolonged lull in private investment in the country could be ascribed to the governments preempting precious funds for electoral gains with the Centre and the states constantly fighting one election or another to bother seriously about real progress.
Development expenditure in our country is mostly focused on transport infrastructure like building metro trains that entail digging the earth in the heart of the cities and raising big buildings for office or residential purposes that demand construction activities on a frenetic pace, literally kicking up mounds of pollutants of all sorts, adding further health-related woes and worries to the citizens. That most of the Indian cities suffer the worst air quality index is an open secret and the casualty here disproportionately falls on the sick, elderly and the people with little means or backup facilities at home or from the charities! For most of them, there is hardly any public health support system and the private health care providers of course have their own reason or unreason in excluding even lower middle-class people from accessing private hospitals with their cost perched prohibitive.
Against this somber setting, two sober reports recently released by non-profit non-governmental bodies have drawn due attention to the dismal situation of how the geriatric group of people find the twilight years of their life troublesome and tenebrous, besides patently unwholesome. The one, by HelpAge India, titled Climate Resilient Ageing- Ensuring Care, Dignity and Agency, surveyed 2,224 elderly people across 20 districts in ten states in the country. The ineluctable but more morose point it highlighted is that older people are increasingly bearing the slings and arrows of climate change, with heatwaves, floods and droughts adding to the extant perils of poor health, financial insecurity, and social isolation.
The survey found that 78 per cent of respondents had encountered one climate-related hazards in the last three years with heatwave (45 per cent), flood (27 per cent) and drought (20 per cent) being the most bruited happenings. Older people living lonely, widows, those aged over four scores of years and individuals with cognitive, communication or mental health issues face unequally upside risks.
Highlighting marked health and economic vulnerabilities, the survey found more than half (52 per cent) said that they were unable to afford essential medicines for survival.
Yet another peer-reviewed study, released on June 12 in the Nature Portfolio journal npj Clean Air, noted that while surface ozone—a pollutant injurious to the heart and lungs—already surpasses safe limits pan-India in the hot pre-monsoon season, the concomitant heatwaves push it to still unimaginably upper levels. This contributes to several hundred deaths to a far larger toll, which the study links to ozone layer across the season. It reported that surface ozone reaches 85-110 micrograms per cubic metre in northern India during intense heatwaves and exceeds the World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline of 70 micrograms per cubic metre in every region of India. The levels subsequently fall back within three to four days of a heatwave subsiding. During the 2024 heatwaves, it links about 26,500 deaths from ischaemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to ozone exposure. The authors of the study contend that surface ozone is not released directly but forms when sunlight drives a reaction among other pollutants, a process that speeds up in heat. “Ozone is very harmful, while NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and HCHO (formaldehyde) directly damage the respiratory systems”, the authors argue, adverting to two of the gases involved in forming ozone layer.
In fine, it is time the focus got shifted to saving the huge swathe of people from emerging and entrenching ecological ailments, even as the demographic dividend is fast turning into a liability in the awful lack of tangible progress on multiple fronts of development.
(G Srinivasan is a senior economic journalist based in New Delhi.)
