Skip to main content

How India Honours its Senior Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer


I renewed my medical insurance this morning. My government grabbed no less than INR 5,680 as GST [Goods and Services Tax]. Taxing a 65-year-old citizen for his medical insurance at the rate of 18% is nothing short of extortion. I have written about this earlier too. Nevertheless, especially since there is no chance of my growing younger, once again I wish to draw the attention of the $5-trillion-dollar economy of my country which has reportedly become a global superpower to my grouse.  

How does India treat its elderly citizens? On paper there are a few Yojanas (schemes). In effect they are only a schemer’s ploys to produce certain comforting illusions. In spite of the half a dozen ‘schemes’ on paper, there is absolutely no universal health insurance or subsidy for the middle-class and self-paying elderly. 18% GST is charged on everyone regardless of age or income.

Mine is a government that has allocated an annual budget of INR 1089 crore for propaganda. That massive amount is spent on foisting seductive fibs on us! The country spends gargantuan amounts on constructing temples, statues, and such things, but cannot afford to care for its ageing citizens. “Ram Lalla has a home now,” my Prime Minister said when the INR 3000 crore temple in Ayodhya was constructed. Ah, at least gods are taken care of.

India’s Prime Minister is a man who loves to travel and he has visited almost all the countries in the world by now, some like the USA many times over. I wish he learnt some things from these countries too. For instance, how do they take care of their elderly citizens?

Let us ask Chat GPT.

 






I don’t want charity from the government. But I do feel strongly that the government should stop being an extortionist at least in this one regard: taxing the senior citizens on medical insurance.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Harsh, indeed. Things are far from perfect for senior cares in these other countries, and there are lots of cracks in the system through which some of us fall, but there is no question that, on the whole, we are quite safe. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very glad you have started recognising Modiesque Sleights of Hand, for what they are.... Illusions. Our task is make the poor have this out of the cave, Enlightenment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You absolutely don't want him learning from the US in this regard. Senior citizens don't have an easy time of it here.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...

The Impact of Your Deed

Illustration by Copilot Designer Thirteen-year-old Briony makes a terrible mistake. She falsely accuses Robbie of raping Lola. Robbie is arrested. Cecilia is heartbroken. Briony herself regrets her act, but too late. All the painful harms have already been done. Atonement can be meaningless sometimes. Briony, Robbie, Cecilia, all belong to Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). Why did Briony make a false charge against Robbie? First of all, there was a serious misunderstanding. Briony presumed that Robbie’s romantic interest in Cecilia, Briony’s elder sister, was lust with a mask. Secondly, Briony was probably jealous of the relationship between her sister and Robbie. As a little child, Briony had jumped into a river merely to be saved by Robbie. When asked why she did such a dangerous thing, her answer was, “Because I love you.” Robbie is accused of raping Lola, Briony’s cousin. It was Paul Marshall who actually violated Lola, not once but twice. Briony did not see the man who r...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...