Labour MP and Social Care Minister Andrew Gwynne stood before cameras this morning, waving a glossy brochure from Delhi’s Ministry of Social Justice. ‘A model for the world,’ he called it. The ‘No One Grows Old Alone’ scheme, India’s flagship programme to combat elder isolation. Sounds noble. Sounds proactive. But I’ve seen enough government handouts to know that when a minister starts talking about ‘scalable frameworks,’ you check the spreadsheet.
Let me walk you through the numbers. The scheme, launched in 2021, aims to provide monthly companionship visits to 5 million elderly Indians living alone. The budget: 1,200 crore rupees, roughly £120 million. That’s £24 per person per year. For context, a single home visit by a UK social worker costs the taxpayer £45. So either Indian volunteers are working for a cup of chai, or someone’s counting ghosts.
Sources inside India’s Ministry of Social Justice confirm that the scheme’s official app, Saathi, has been downloaded 2.3 million times. But field audits conducted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in 2023 revealed that only 12 per cent of registered beneficiaries had actually received a visit within the first six months. The auditors flagged ‘systemic inflation of data’ in three states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. Translation: the numbers were cooked.
Here’s the dirty secret: these schemes are perfect for skimming. You create a target population, you allocate funds per head, you issue fake visit reports, and you pocket the difference. It’s the same playbook we saw in the UK’s troubled families programme, where £200 million went missing between 2011 and 2015. Mr Gwynne should know. He was a junior minister then.
Let me be clear: the intention behind ‘No One Grows Old Alone’ is genuine. India’s elderly population is exploding. 150 million people over 60, and a third live alone. The welfare system is overstretched, families are fragmented, and loneliness kills faster than smoking. But praising a scheme that hasn’t delivered measurable results is reckless. Politicians love a photo op with a smiling pensioner. They hate talking about the 400,000 elderly Indians who died alone last year because the call centre couldn’t pick up.
I obtained internal emails from the Ministry of Social Justice, dated January 2024, that show senior officials complaining about ‘reporting fatigue’ and ‘target-creep’. One email from a joint secretary reads: ‘We are being asked to show 100 per cent coverage by March. This is not feasible without adjusting denominators.’ Adjusting denominators. That’s civil service speak for lying.
Gwynne today said the UK could learn from India’s ‘community-based approach’. He’s right. We could learn exactly how not to do it. The UK’s own loneliness strategy, published in 2022, promised £12 million for community connectors. By last month, only £4 million had been spent. The rest got lost in departmental overheads. Sound familiar?
The real scandal is that both governments are using the same playbook: announce a big number, grab the headline, and let the auditors clean up the mess three years later. By then, the minister has moved on. The scheme gets rebranded. And the elderly remain alone.
If Mr Gwynne wants to export a model, let him export India’s accountability framework. The Right to Information Act. The independent audit reports. The court cases that forced the scheme to publish real-time data on the Saathi dashboard. That’s the only part of the policy that works. Because it forces them to show their working.
I spoke to a retired accountant in Varanasi yesterday. He’s 78, lives alone, registered for the scheme in 2022. He’s had one visit. From a college student who asked him to sign a form saying he’d had twelve. The student got paid per sign. The old man got nothing.
That’s the model. And it’s coming soon to a constituency near you.
