The number of aged people, who end up being in old age homes in the last leg of their life, is growing with social transformation and evolving lifestyles. The changing notions of the family and relations, fast urbanization, movement of the youth to different places in search of better life & career, growing nuclear family system, generation gap, weakening cultural ethos and scarce of resources are also some of the factors that adequately add to this process.
With Amitabh Bachchan making an announcement on Twitter about the dream of late Lata Mangeshkar to build an old age home named Swar Mauli near Nashik for ageing artists from the field of theatre, music, cinema and the performing arts, who have fallen on hard times, the issue has again shot into limelight. Bollywood celebrities like Pravin Babi, Meena Kumari, Vimi, A K Hangal, Rajendra Malone, Naseem Bano, Cuckoo, Bhagwan Dada, Bharat Bhushan, Chandra Mohan and a few others are among many stars who spent their last days in loneliness and penury. Even Dada Saheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema met a lone and tragic death with no one around. We often tend to remember the tragic part of only top personalities, however, a lot more are forced to live in dark and doom, whom hardly anyone cares for.
Here comes the role of philanthropists, playing a vital role for welfare of the society. Though, this trend is not quite popular up in India, it is fast picking up with a few corporate benevolent pledging big sum of money for the humanitarian causes. Only recently, Gautam Adani, India’s richest man pledged to donate Rs. 60,000 crore towards charity, which is one tenth of his total net worth of around 95 billion dollar and this money will be used for a range of social causes including healthcare, education and skill development. The chairman of Wipro has consistently been by far the biggest philanthropist among Indian billionaires. With his foundation established in 2001, Azin Premji is doing a lot of works to improve the quality education especially in rural India. Having worked with over 3.5 lakh schools in the country, Premji has donated over Rs. 17,600 crore in the last two years and Rs. 7904 crore in 2020. HCL Technologies founder-chairman Shiv Nadar too has been at the forefront, donating money for humanitarian causes (Donation of Rs. 1263 crore in 2021 itself).
Mukesh Ambani, the head of Reliance Industries donated Rs. 557 crore in the last fiscal and occupied the third spot in EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2021. Similarly, Kumar Mangalam Birla and family donated Rs. 337 crore in the same year and stood at fourth spot on the list. Aditya Birla Group donated Rs. 400 crore to the PM CARES Fund and 50 crore to FICCI-Aditya Birla CSR Centre for Excellence. Among top donators, Infosys’ Nandan Nilekani with Rs. 183 crore, Hindusja family with Rs. 166 crore, the Bajaj family with Rs. 136 crore, Anil Agrawal and family with Rs. 130 crore and Burman family of Dabur Group with Rs. 114 crore in financial year 2021, occupy space among the top 10.
The growing challenges thrown upon the people in old age, besides a large number of people already facing poverty, deprivation, malnutrition and all sorts of shortages, there is always a need to make an effort to help and support social welfare causes by way of donations. This is the reason why most of the CSR efforts in India are guided towards education, health, women and children, skill building and old age people.
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