In a dusty village in Kerala, a 72-year-old widow named Radha used to spend her days staring at the same wall. Her children had emigrated to the Gulf. Her neighbours were strangers.
She was, by all measures, one of the millions of invisible elderly in modern India. Then a local government scheme assigned her a ‘community buddy’ – a younger volunteer who visits twice a week, helps with errands, and simply sits and listens. Radha now laughs again.
She has a WhatsApp group with six others in her housing complex. She recently attended a film club screening organised by the panchayat. The loneliness, she says, ‘has been lifted like a monsoon cloud’.
This is not an anecdote designed to warm the heart. It is the result of a deliberate, state-wide policy that has caught the attention of the World Health Organisation. Kerala’s ‘One State, One Family’ programme, launched in 2022, has been lauded by WHO director Dr Tedros as a model for tackling the epidemic of loneliness that plagues both the developed and developing world.
The initiative is strikingly simple: a centralised database of at-risk individuals – the elderly, the disabled, single parents, migrant workers – matched with a network of trained volunteers and local institutions. Think of it as a sort of social NHS, with ‘prescriptions’ for companionship, mental health support, and community engagement. The results have been startling.
Hospital admissions for depression among the elderly in pilot districts dropped by 40 per cent. Suicide rates fell by 15 per cent. And the cost?
A fraction of what the UK spends on social care, with far greater reach. The British social care model, often lauded for its principles but criticised for its funding gaps, has been adapted with a distinctly Indian twist: a reliance on community rather than the state alone. Volunteers are not paid, but they receive training, recognition and a sense of purpose.
‘We are not reinventing the wheel,’ says Dr Sarada Menon, the programme’s architect. ‘We are simply reminding people that loneliness is a public health emergency, and that the cure is each other.’ The praise from WHO has been fulsome.
In a statement, the organisation noted that the programme ‘demonstrates the power of social prescribing and community-based care in a resource-constrained setting’. For the UK, where loneliness is estimated to affect 9 million adults and cost the economy £2.5 billion a year, there are lessons to be learned.
But also a dose of humility. As Radha’s story shows, the solution to loneliness may not lie in more government spending or high-tech apps. It may lie in the simple, radical act of showing up.
‘When someone comes just to be with you,’ Radha says, ‘that is the greatest medicine.’ And in a world where isolation is ever more common, that is a prescription worth filling.
