Who Cares for the Caregiver? Elderly Women, Gendered Ageing, and India’s Unpaid Care Economy

Abstract

India’s transition toward an ageing society has intensified concerns surrounding care, dependency, and social welfare. However, prevailing legal and policy frameworks continue to approach ageing as a largely uniform experience, overlooking the deeply gendered realities of later life. Within this context, elderly women occupy a uniquely vulnerable position. Many continue to perform substantial unpaid caregiving responsibilities—supporting spouses, caring for grandchildren, and sustaining domestic life—while simultaneously facing financial insecurity, declining health, widowhood, and dependence on fragile informal support systems. This paper places elderly women at the centre of India’s unpaid care economy and argues that their vulnerabilities are not incidental to old age but are produced through cumulative structural inequalities across the life course. Drawing on feminist economics, welfare economics, life-course analysis, and socio-legal scholarship, the paper examines how unpaid care work, informal employment histories, unequal access to property, and limited social protection contribute to heightened insecurity in later life. The paper critically evaluates India’s legal and policy responses to ageing, including maintenance laws, pension schemes, and welfare measures, demonstrating that these frameworks continue to treat care primarily as a private familial responsibility rather than socially valuable labour deserving public recognition and institutional support. In response, the paper introduces the Silver Equity Theory, a new theoretical framework that reconceptualizes elderly women not as passive dependents, but as generators of social and economic value through caregiving, emotional labour, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and community participation. The theory advances a rights-based and gender-sensitive approach to ageing policy grounded in the principles of recognition, redistribution, regeneration, and representation. It argues for a shift away from moralized assumptions of familial responsibility toward a collective understanding of care as a shared social and economic obligation anchored in dignity, equality, and economic justice. The paper argues that India needs a policy for its elderly women recognizing and supporting their invisible labour as it is essential for advancing economic justice, gender equality, and inclusive development in an ageing India.