Ageing, Disability, and Institutional Care of the Elderly: A Case Study of Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh

Impairment is not a rare human condition. It is both coexistent and co-terminus with life. It exists in the social space. The person who suffers from it does not choose it. It is both inborn and accidental. But what is crucial in this connection is to see how society approaches this pathology. Disability as socially mediated discrimination, therefore, is a social phenomenon. The recurrence of impairment is more likely to be seen among ageing people as it constitutes the inevitable causation for the final closure of life. Against the background of an inalterable biological facticity, the dignity of dying with the intervention of care both human and medical remains central to the gerontological journey. The underlying need for human care, primarily from the family members, is the most rudimentary aspiration that an aged person with impairment expects. But in the neo-liberal social space, the family has become nuclear. It has lost its composite nature where everybody both old and young is accommodated. The effects of unrestrained modernity in the social space of Northeast India have seemingly restricted the scope of reversing the status quo or returning to the prelapsarian condition. The expanding city space, competition, economic aspirations, and toxic individualism have exercised an overriding impact on the conventional social ethos of co-existence. This variant of social imagination considers ageing people as non-productive and essentially dependent. It stimulates a disposable attitude towards the elderly and concomitant social apathy. This kind of emerging attitudinal shift has seemingly exacerbated the nature of impairment and inflicted disability. The state as a political entity has taken up the role of encouraging the institutions of repairment to minimize the scope and gravity of disability. Therefore, this chapter studies the lives of the elderly and their disabilities both physical and psychological and the intervention of institutional care to address their concerns in the Itanagar Capital Complex of Arunachal Pradesh to make assumptions relating to the status of ageing-related disabilities in the northeastern part of India.