Here we have it: a scheme from a corner of the world we often condescend to, and it shames our own threadbare social fabric. The Indian state of Rajasthan has launched a programme promising that ‘no one grows old alone’, providing companionship and care for the elderly. And who is taking notice?
British social care reformers, no less. Good. Let them learn.
For this is not a policy gimmick; it is a cultural reflex, a remnant of the communal ethos we in the West have systematically dismantled in the name of individual liberty and fiscal convenience. The Victorian workhouse has been reborn as a privatised care home, and we wonder why our elderly die in loneliness. Meanwhile, in Rajasthan, the state steps in where the family, stretched by modernity, can no longer cope.
The scheme is modest and imperfect, no doubt. But it represents a recognition that dignity in old age is a collective responsibility, not a commodity to be traded. Britain’s social care crisis, by contrast, is a masterpiece of bureaucratic neglect and moral cowardice.
We have allowed the idea of ‘family’ to atrophy, replaced by the cold comfort of a state that funds the bare minimum and a market that profits from misery. The Rajasthan model is a mirror held up to our own failures. Do not expect our politicians to see it; they are too busy congratulating themselves on austerity measures that have left the elderly rationing meals.
But we, the citizens, should be ashamed. And then we should act. The cycle of decline need not be inevitable.
But it will require a return to the simple, unfashionable virtue of looking after one another.
