With youngsters becoming economic migrants, Bengaluru startups are mobilising foot soldiers and caregivers who not only run errands but also provide companionship for their parents back home

Dr Meena Nagarjunan (81) eagerly looks forward to Tuesdays when her “care manager” comes over to spend a couple of hours with her and her husband. He runs errands for them, paying the electricity, telephone bills and sometimes even goes over to the nearby South Indian restaurant to get her favourite foods.

With nuclear families on the rise and more elders fending for themselves, startups are now recognising a huge opportunity, and playing the proxy child. They make available people who can buy groceries, take them to the doctor, stay with them at the hospital, help get plumbing and electrical work done, take them to the movies, plan a lunch/dinner outing, or even just hang out with them at home.

Niranjan Acharya (72) lives by himself after he lost his wife 10 years ago. Child-free and with no relatives in the city, Acharya keeps the number of his care manager close on hand at all times. When he recently went through a dental surgery, Acharya was accompanied by his care buddy who stayed with him during the procedure and dropped him back; or another time, when he was in the ICU and didn’t have anyone to stay with him at the hospital. “The help makes a hu­ge difference. It’s difficult for friends to suddenly come over and stay at the hospital. Otherwise, it can be a worrying situation,” he says.

It is projected that the proportion of Indians aged 60 and above will rise from 7.5 per cent in 2010 to 11.1 per cent in 2025. In 2010, India had more than 91.6 million elderly and the number of elderly in India is projected to reach 158.7 million in 2025, which means the market for service providers for senior citizens in India is only on the rise.

“There are a lot of players in the market who offer post-operative care, but there are few who offer seniors a quality life as they age. Many of them feel disconnected and lonely, and feel as if they are not adding value. We want to get rid of that mindset,” says Santosh Abraham, co-founder of ElderAid Wellness.

Devanshi Seth, founder of Caveo, agrees. She finds that often times their clients are fit but are in need of companionship. “Most parents just lack engagement. Their children want to give them time but can’t,” she says. This is why they send a trained geriatric counsellor even when their clients want to go for recreational activities.

“If we just send a volunteer, there’s going to be no conversation. After some small talk, both of them won’t know what to say or do. Many seniors often open up to counsellors about their personal lives and the counsellors know how to steer the conversation. It’s a listening mode, they talk about legal matters, their younger days, things that they can’t talk with their children,” Seth says, adding, “We often have children telling us that their parents are depressed. However, when we go over, we find that they are just in need of company and support for day-to-day activities, and are rarely clinically depressed.”

Sometimes, requests include figuring out a celebration for a parent – a task that involves choosing the right restaurant based on their likes and dislikes, picking them up, dropping them off, and in rare cases even sharing a meal with them. “We do that only if they make a special request for it,” she says. At other times, seniors ask for help with learning gadgets, taking them shopping for an hour or two and coordinating hobby classes.

Abraham and his team also encourage seniors to take up hobbies. On a pilot basis, he got a volunteer to come home and teach a senior in her late 80s the violin, something she had learnt in her younger days, which Abraham felt would now help with her dementia.

THE BACK STORY

These startups have most often stemmed from their personal experiences. Rahul Upadhyay’s seniorshelf.com, a company aggregating products and services for the elderly, says that the essential idea is to enable children to help their parents – who are otherwise hampered by age, no matter how separated they are by the distance. “The idea came about when my mom had a mishap and the doctor recommended that I buy a blood pressure machine for her. I spent almost five hours looking all over the city for a machine and finally got one near a hospital. That incident brought out the difficulty elderly have in accessing products and services that they require. Hence the idea of a website where one can find almost all things for an elderly person in one place,” he says.

Abraham and his co-founder too were in a similar situation. His parents settled in Thiruvananthapuram were keen to lead an independent life while Abraham was concerned how they would go about their day-to-day activities, which was the reason he switched roles from a corporate job to a “social enterprise”. His co-founder Dr Vandana Nadig Nair, was witness to her aunts and uncles in Bengaluru with children in other cities / countries, who needed help and support; children who visited as frequently as once a month to tend to their parents. “But there was worry on all sides,” he says.

MONEY TALKS

ElderAid offers packages starting at Rs 1,900 a month to Rs 7,200, which includes medical emergency responses (going along with the client in the ambulance to running around in the hospital, paying bills, buying medicines, and even staying with them for 48 hours until their children come in), filing in medical documents, weekly calls and visits during which they take them to a park, grocery store, supermarket etc. The website seniorshelf.com ties up with other partners for activities such as pilgrimages and tours—one of them they offer is The Ramayana Trail in Sri Lanka, and are currently in the process of offering domestic pilgrimage services too. The pricing for Caveo’s services are anywhere between Rs 2,000 and Rs 8,000 on a monthly basis, which can include outings to a mall, grocery store, and other events.

ElderCare has a subscription packages for three months, six months and a year, wherein the charges are approximately Rs 60 per day for the allocation of care buddy/ care manager. This includes two free visits a month to assess general well-being of the senior and help with household chores.

FUNDING