Issues of Elderly Population in Nepal

Background

The Senior Citizens Acts 2063, Nepal defines the senior citizens (elderly population) as "people who are 60 years and above".The population of senior citizens has been increasing in Nepal rapidly among which one of the main reasons is positive development in Life expectancy rate. The total population of elderly people in Nepal is 6.5 percent of total population which has significantly increased over the years. It is estimated that elderly population is still more likely to increase rapidly in future. This increase in elderly population will have a profound impact on the individuals, families and communities. And it has already started to show the impact in Nepal. The reason behind the increase in number of elderly population is the processes of mortality and fertility reduction which has shown   dramatic increase in the proportion of elderly people in the country. The increase in the population of elderly people, in absolute and relative terms, poses challenges in both developmental and humanitarian areas in terms of promoting and realizing their rights as well as well-being of elderly people by meeting their social, emotional, health, financial and developmental needs. And in the context of Nepal, there are many issues of elderly people in rural areas compared to urban areas because majority of the population lives in rural areas.

Issues in rural areas

In the developing countries like Nepal many aspects like education, health, transportation, poverty etc plays a bigger role for creating challenges and problems. For example poverty has always been the issue in the rural areas of Nepal. Not only poverty but lack of good quality education and health services has made the rural areas more vulnerable. There is no access to hospital. People have to walk more than 7 8 hour just to reach health post in many areas. Similarly poverty has lead all the youths in rural areas to migrate towards gulf countries for labour migration resulting that most of the population left in rural areas to be of children and elderly people. Due to this they are not able to do agriculture because they don't find many workers and they don't have any activities to keep them engaged. Old age allowance has always been the problem. It's not sufficient for elderly people receiving 500 RS per month which has been recently changed in 2015 to rs1000. And even though they are getting the allowance many people in rural areas are unaware about the allowance and at the same time many don't have access to the respective authority/ local government to receive the allowance. Health issue is another big problem faced by elderly people. Elderly people are dying just because they are not getting any basic health check up. In the same way they are far more behind regarding the current affairs in the central areas because they don’t have good access/ minimum access towards technology and news. They have to walk far just to buy a sack of rice and they have to pay extra amount for the carrier in many part of Nepal such as Rasuwa, Karnali, Humla, Dadeldhura and many other rural districts of Nepal. Quality of life of elderly in rural is very poor and miserable compared to urban elderly people. There are issues of discrimination among higher cast and low cast ethnic group

Issues in urban areas

            The urban elderly seem to be more privileged compared to rural elderly and but at the same time their condition is really worse in urban areas as well. The biggest issue of elderly people in urban areas is abandonment from their children. There are many cases where the elderly people are abandoned by their children during their old age period. There are severe cases like leaving them in the street, temple. In some cases the children in urban areas keep their parents until they assign their property to their children name. After giving the property to children, many cases have been found that the children have abandoned their parents; some even claim that their parents are dead in order to get their properties.

Urbanization and modernization is another big problem for elderly to cope of with. They don't have any activities to do the whole day. Most of the elderly children leave for office and they lock their parents at home. They are alone whole day at the home without anyone to talk to and anything to do. The biggest issue is that the urban elderly live their life in loneliness. In urban areas many family structure is nuclear family. Children are always busy in technology and gadgets and their friends. Parents are busy in their job. The only problem is for elderly because they have no one to talk, no one to share their feelings and emotion and they don’t have an economic activity to be engaged in. Due to this urban elderly people are facing psychological and mental problem such as depression, trauma, and stress. Similarly they don’t have much company of people if they want to visit outside or roam around or talk to neighbouring people because many people in urban areas are very sophisticated and they just keep to themselves. And this thing makes the life of elderly people more difficult to live in urban areas.

Conclusion

There are not adequate amount of programs for elderly people and to run the program first their need to be plans and policies. And it is very important that the policies should meet the need of elderly people. Otherwise the condition of elderly population is going to be very miserable in near future.