POPULATION-SRI LANKA: Elderly Face a World of Less Support, Care

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 2 2001 (IPS) - Sri Lanka’s demographers are warning that the nation’s ageing population faces difficult times ahead, given the cuts in state-run pension schemes and the lack of traditional care at home.

This bleak future stems from the country’s negligible economic growth, which has undermined hopes of prosperity and also forced more women, the traditional care-givers for the aged, to leave their homes in search of work.

“We are facing a serious crisis. Other populations age when their economies are prosperous. But here there is rapid growth while economic prosperity is down. We have an ageing population that would be a burden on the country,” says Professor Indralal De Silva, one of Sri Lanka’s population experts.

The elderly, he notes, would not have women at home, such as their daughters, to care for them, since “their main caretakers are going abroad, joining the local workforce or involved in higher education”.

Women make up 70 percent of the roughly one million Sri Lankans working in the Middle East. In addition, the number of women in the domestic workforce has risen from 12 percent in 1990 to 37 percent by 1999.

Cuts in the government’s social programmes will also deny comfort to the aged, given the lack of proper pension schemes and the World Bank recommended changes in the state pension structure to reduce costs.

Although the country has several security systems, these do not adequately cover the needs of the elderly at retirement, say economists, who add that the retirement benefits currently available cover only about one half of the elderly because most employment is in informal activities.

The public service pension scheme is estimated to cover about 1.1 million out of an estimated workforce of 6.1 million people in 1998. The pension schemes in the private sector are estimated to cover around two million.

The remaining three million workers are in the informal sector and have to rely largely on their savings.

Currently, Sri Lanka has some 19 million people, a number that is expected to grow and stabilise at 22 million people after 40 years. But what is worrying for both De Silva and officials at the country’s census department are the shifting signs in the country’s median age in these numbers.

“If everyone stood in a queue according to the ages and we pick the middle person in 1991, it would be 25 years. In 2001 it is 28 years, while in 2041 it will be 40 years, which is a high age for a population,” says De Silva, head of the Colombo University’s demography department.

In a presentation to the business community on population trends and ageing last month, he said that the impact to the economy from an ageing population was enormous.

Studies say that there would be a larger percentage of people aged 60 years and over in addition to more females, resulting in a rise in the dependency ratio.

Currently, 100 working people in the population look after 65 dependents, including children. This is expected to rise to 100 per 72.5 percent dependants by 2041.

Old age dependents represented 13.5 percent of the population in 1991, but that is expected to rise dramatically to 47.9 percent in 2041. In contrast, child dependents are expected to fall to 24.6 percent in 2041 against 51.9 percent in 1991.

Indeed, “there is a need for setting up more homes for the elders and providing them with facilities like free or subsidised bus and train travel and other benefits like in western societies,” says Mano Muthukrishna, spokeswoman for a recently established non-governmental organisation on ageing.

The government is also responding to such concerns. This month, an official from the social services department said that laws are being introduced to protect parents. Adults who neglect and leave their elderly parents in distress will be dealt with by the law, the official told a local newspaper.

The latest population census held in July also shows declining growth trends. According to Wimal Nanayakkara, director-general of the Census Department, population figures gathered this time show only marginal differences in most areas when compared with the 1981 census.

The census was only conducted in 18 of the country’s 24 districts, after officials abandoned the count in the war-torn northern and eastern regions where Tamil rebels had threatened to disrupt the exercise.

The latest census also shows growth in the number of the female population. The number of males per 100 females had declined to 97.9 from 103.9 in 1981, and is estimated to fall to 95.9 in 2041.

Births of both sexes had dropped to 320,000 a year from 400,000 in the mid-1980s, says Nanayakkara.

De Silva told the ageing seminar organised by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce that while there was hardly any difference between births and deaths in the 1950s or 1970s, the mortality rate is decreasing against the birth rate now mainly due to good health and medical education, and health practices.

Sri Lanka’s social indicators, including its emphasis on health services and education, have been hailed as a model in Asia and figure very high on the United Nations’ human development index.

Unfortunately the country’s great strides in health and education — which were far ahead of countries like even Singapore or Malaysia in the 1940s to the 1950s — have not been matched by economic development and prosperity.

To address these issues, De Silva is calling for a plan to use current demographic patterns for development, which the country lacks at present. “Most of the prosperous Asian countries developed using these demographic patterns — unlike Sri Lanka where we are likely to miss the train.”