KOCHI: Pleas for help from the elderly people are flooding Elderline Kerala, a helpline launched exclusively for people aged 60 and above on November 1, in line with the national helpline for senior citizens.
The national programme was started on October 1 in New Delhi and Kerala started the helpline a month later.
In a month, more than 5,500 calls were received here on the hotline — 14567. People aged 60 and above can call the hotline from 8am to 8pm.
More than 80% callers are senior citizens themselves, said officials at the headquarters.
In some cases, neighbours or those who have witnessed the difficulties being faced by the elderly inform the issue on the helpline.
The official added that the number of calls received at the similar offices in other states are very less (sometimes below 100).
“One main reason could be that education and awareness in Kerala are more compared to the other states and even senior citizens are aware of their rights and facilities available. More people also have access to mobile phones here. Associations for the elderly and their WhatsApp groups are more active in Kerala. Other states might not be having these many awareness campaigns and educated communities of senior citizens,” an official from the technical wing said.
The number of nuclear families is also higher in proportion to to the population in Kerala and there are chances for more family disputes here, he added.
The calls are received at the headquarters, after which information will be passed onto the field response officers.
There are only seven field response officers and one officer has to handle the issues in two districts.
According to Sreeja P M, programme manager of Elderline Kerala, there have also been instances of people manipulating the service, attaching their elderly parents to the case they wanted to pursue.
“Some might want to get a house vacated and will request us by saying that they need it vacated for their elderly mother, but the tenants are not moving out. Earlier, more calls were related to Covid and recently, the calls are more about tension and abuses,” she said.
Some callers complain that they have not been receiving pension for months, or they need some help from the government.
In such cases, their issues are brought before the respective departments so that their issues can be resolved.
In some other cases of family disputes, where the elderly complain that their family members are harassing them, the issue has to be referred to the cops.
These calls are collected using a software called CRM. The registered calls are attended, details collected and sent to the mobile phones of the respective field officers. Around 540 cases have been referred to the field staff.
In Uttarakhand, there were only 14 such cases. In Karnataka, the number of cases referred to the field staff was just 40, whereas in Tamil Nadu, it was 50.
One of the officers had to deal with 140 cases last month.
The officers expect that the number of field staff might be increased according to the increasing number of cases. Six elderly people, who were found abandoned, were admitted to various elderly homes last month.
However, if such people have children, they cannot be admitted to government homes.
Though NGOs are running the hotline in many other states, in Kerala, the same project is being run under the Department of Social Justice under a special project titled Elderline.
