Ageing activities of daily living disabilities and the need for public health initiatives: some evidence from a household survey in Delhi.

Besides highlighting the need for public health initiatives the present paper may also serve to make a case for evolving a long-term care strategy for the physically challenged aged. This is particularly important owing to the growing disengagement of families in providing care to their ADL dependent elderly. Any such arrangement may however have important financial and subsidy implications. This paper refrains from going into those issues as they fall beyond the scope of this work. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: The next section provides a few conceptual details about the ADL disabilities followed by an application of this concept based on a household survey with elderly co-residents drawn from all the nine administrative districts of the national capital territory of Delhi. This discussion also briefly mentions the relevance of such exercises from different angles ranging from families to care providers and insurance agencies. The following section is devoted to an econometric analysis dealing with the socio-economic risk factors in causing disabilities in later years. The next section as noted earlier deals with the three different pathways of the disabilities with the intrinsic objective of suggesting that a considerable number of disabilities in India are non-senescent. Hence public health agencies should strive to make people aware of the need for healthy ageing and adopt a clinical approach with the distribution of health- augmenting medicines such as vitamins to the needy aged. Certain policy imperatives are discussed at the end of the paper. (excerpt)