A demographic disaster in waiting?

By N Sathiya Moorthy

Over years and decades, they have become mere statistics. There is little acknowledgement among policy-makers, whether belonging to the bureaucratic types or the political class, that something needs to be done, that too quick and fast, on the ‘demographic disaster’ that is waiting to happen in this country.

Different studies at different times have shown different things about different demographics in the country – all of them pointing to the fact that all is not well for the future generations, and hence for the nation that they are expected to populate. Thus on the one hand that the nation is ageing fast and there is little care for the aged, while there is an increasing incidence of psychological strain among the youth, especially the school-going boys and girls, for whom alone ready data can be amassed and assessed.  

On the International Day of the Elderly, it was revealed that the number of people aged 60 years stood at 12.5 per cent of the total 22-million population, but by 2050, or just 25 years from now, the figure would have doubled to 25 per cent.  This is against the working-age population that now stands at around 0.83 million at present.

That is to say, this segment of population, in effect, is earning to feed the rest of them all, even aged parents, kids at home or school-going children. The alternative is for the State to fund the education of the young-adults and the healthcare of the aging, not to forget housing for both.

That should explain why the farming community that accounts for 26.26 per cent, or more than one in every four, is seeing an increasing shrinkage in the younger generation wanting to get out of it, and settle for a city-job, even if that of a janitor or whatever. If nothing else, the wind and weather patterns do not interfere with their stable incomes, and shocking disturbances like the Covid lock-down do not happen every other decade or even century.

It is not clear how far the end of terrorism of every kind, of the JVP has first and the LTTE later, encouraged this city-bound migration. But then, across the world that has also been the trend in most developing countries, where a perception has gained ground that agriculture neither pays, nor is there any social status attaching to it.

Yes, definitely, there is some truth in the assumption that a village-level is not conducive to knowledge-seeking, unless the child is in a school and not in a farmland as a labourer. But then that most city-jobs are temporary and living conditions for them are squalid does not seem to matter, at least initially. By the time realisation dawns, they are neither here, nor there, age-wise and otherwise.

Psychological crutch

It is ironic that whoever sits up somewhere up there and slots dates for the world to celebrate or observe something or the other, chose October as the month for the World Elderly Day (1 October) and World Mental Health Day (10 October). If the idea was for the nation in general and policy-maker in particular to get a comprehensive view of it all, he might have been sadly mistaken – or, that seems so, going by what we now have today.

Thus, even when the elderly have to fend for themselves in many cases including what was once a family-centric community as Sri Lanka used to be, you now have reports of the nation’s youth too feeling the stresses and strains that once used to be associated only with the older people. The convention had it that between them, the grandparents and the grandchildren provided the psychological crutch in joint families, and became the bonding force for the intermediary age-group to keep the family together – not just the body but also the soul.

According to reports, a recent survey of school-children in the 13-17 age-group showed that over a fifth of them, or over 20 per cent, complained of persistent feelings of loneliness. Nearly 12 per cent admitted to experiencing sleep disturbances linked to emotional distress, while around 18 per cent exhibited symptoms consistent with depression.

As if this were not enough, a further 7.5 per cent said they had no close friends. Worse still, one in four students, or a quarter of the school-going population, disclosed having no one they could confide in about their personal problems. According to the study team, nearly 75 per cent of students have no trustworthy adult or even a peer to open up to, and that is saying a lot. In the past grandparents used to offer their shoulders readily to those kids, and also kept a close eye on their conduct and character.

In today’s nuclear families, it is unclear if the parents neither have the time nor the inclination to spare quality time for their children, or they too face the same way, in their own world (maybe a separate study could provide the answers, or at least a hint). Anyway, it is a rat-race that we are possibly talking about, with parents competing among themselves at one level and are also competing with their children at another – say, in terms of emotional quotient and the like.

Innocent, intelligent

In a changing world and its priorities, possibly everyone has contributed to his own plight. For instance, most children – and also adults, including parents, grandparents and teachers – are wedded to mobile screens more than any other. By the time they discover (or are made to discover through such surveys), they are lost.

Of course, beyond all this is the changing social and family structures and personal and parental aspirations for their children, which is casually dismissed as ‘peer pressure’. The parents forget that it is their peer pressure that they cause to visit their children, who might have continued to live innocent, and yet intelligent lives, as they themselves had done in their times.

The worst is still reserved for alcoholics and substance-users, who account for at least 20,000 deaths a year in the country. This figure does not reveal the extent of health, financial and family-related problems flowing from alcoholism and substance-abuse.

Interestingly, or ironically, the economic and health costs of alcohol abuse in 2023, for instance, was at Rs. 237 billion, compared with alcohol-centric excise revenue of Rs. 181.1 billion. Yes, the excise revenue on this score only keeps increasing year on year, but so has the economic cost of alcoholism. It however cannot include the psychological cost on family and friends, who carry a scar all through their lives.

In the midst of all these are persistent reports, especially post-Covid about increasing instances of substance-abuse among school-going children, both boys and girls, and how the latter are sexually exploited, too, on this score. As if this were not enough, Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya’s recent statement that as many as 38 infants and toddlers were growing up behind bars, because their mothers are there already – and will begin seeing the world from inside the prison, which is not the best way to grow up in your childhood, or adulthood either….

That too is not just statistics. Instead, together they weave a futuristic story of demographic disaster that is waiting to happen. Who knows, if the nation does not wake up in time, you will have a zombie Sri Lanka in the decades, if not years to come, that can threaten to become another Colombia-like nation, living, of, by and for drugs, and whose young population too looks like they are already old, and the older population looks at nothing!

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)