Anthropology of Aging: Contexts, Culture and Implications

In the last one decade there has been a growing awareness of the life and problems of the retirees in India. This awareness has partly been brought about by the information of several regional associations and national organizations of pensioners and partly by the growth of public and private retirement systems in consonance with the technological, economic, social and political changes in Indian society. Keeping race with all demographic, social, economic and technological changes, the retirees have become a composite of diversities based upon several objective and subjective factors. In this context, the problems of the gazetted and non-gazetted retirees are often spelt out in striking contrast. The view posited by the gazetted retirees is that retirement has wrought them loss of status, loss of respect, and loss of income and has created a number of economic, social, psychological and physical problems. On the contrary, the view expressed by the non-gazetted retirees is that among the retirees they are the worse sufferers because they have to face more number of social, psychological, economic and physical problems than the gazetted retirees. This polarization of view-points of the two categories of retired employees has become a puzzle to the policy makers, administrators and scientists alike because the standpoints of the gazetted and non-gazetted retirees have not been supported with statistical ammunition and scientific information to document their differential charges against their own conditions and problems. The present inquiry is an-depth study of the gazetted and non-gazetted retirees in Tirupati, a pilgrim town located in the north-eastern part of Chittoor District in the State of Andhra Pradesh. It focuses its attention on the following lines. What exactly is the working man complex among the gazetted and non-gazetted employees? What is its influence on retirement? How does retirement represent an economically non-productive role for the retirees whose labour is not considered essential or necessary for the functioning of the economic order? Although economically, while departure from life-long career serves as the basic operational indicator of retirement, sociologically how retirement becomes a prescribed transition from a position of an economically active person in accordance with the norms through which society defines and determines the nature of this change? How do the gazetted and non-gazetted retirees face an instantaneous fall in income and social contacts? What are the similarities and differences in the patterns of adjustment of the gazetted and non-gazetted retirees? Is the post-retirement adjustment of the gazetted or non-gazetted retirees homogeneous or heterogeneous? If heterogeneous, what factors are responsible for creating the diversity in the patterns of adjustment within the gazetted category or non-gazetted category of retirees?