Bittoo is in the evening of her life. Her balding head is dementia-addled and the activity she looks forward to the most is banging the sun-burnt gates till the friction turns her palms red, pleading the passersby to take her to her family. She hurls abuses at the superintendent for not letting her access a telephone, hallucinates that her brothers are splashing her photographs on metro pillars and searching for her, and she often wrestles with guards when they try to pull her back into the building. Bittoo is not an inmate in a mental asylum, she is an inmate at a state-run old age home in Bindapur, Dwarka. And the irony is, none of the staff there has any kind of specialisation in handling a case like hers.
In a government old-age home, admissions are made on court orders or inhabitants are brought in by the police. Out of the 75 elderlies packed into a space meant for 50, around 35 are suffering from cognitive impairments. In Delhi, where senior citizens comprise of 11 per cent of the population (nearly 20 lakh), there are only two government old age homes. The other one is at Lampur, on the Delhi-Haryana border, with a capacity of only 25.
The Bindapur home is government-run on an annual budget of Rs 1.4 crore, out of which `10 lakh is spent on sanitation and Rs 30 to Rs 40 lakh goes into food and nutrition; corruption at lower levels is no conjecture. One, out of the four caretakers, who works there say that the government hasn’t hired a single keeper since 2010 and there are less than 80 posts for grade 2 welfare officers in the capital.
Inside a large room on the third floor, 25 mentally-unstable women are flocked together. In salwars kameezes stained with urine, food and spit, they lie around lifelessly. “When they hear the television in my room, they come here and start dancing. Maybe if someone understands them, they’ll get better,” says Anjali Malhotra, HelpAge India volunteer stationed at the home since a decade. While her organisation runs its own old age homes in Punjab and Uttarakhand, they are denied land to build one in Delhi.
Mathew Cherian, CEO, says the mobile medical van caters to ailments like hypertension and lung disorders, but is incapable of dealing with mental disorders. “In the past, we have also noticed authorities beating up those who misbehave. Loneliness, coupled with a deficiency or excess of sodium and potassium in the blood stream, leads to weakening of mental strength. Even classifying them as mentally sick is a difficult task,” he says.
Some schizophrenics or others prone to epileptic seizures are put on floor beds in rooms with those who are mentally sound. H L Ghai, an English-speaking octogenarian staying at the home since the last 17 years, finds it hard to share his room with Baba, who can’t open taps, often hides his food under his bed and babbles through the night. “During the Commonwealth Games, Sheila Dikshit rehabilitated the crippled and the intellectually-disabled in our home and it has become a practice since then,” he laments.
Dr Samir Parikh, consultant psychiatrist and Director of Department of Mental Health and Behavioral Sciences at Fortis Healthcare says, “In a country like India, which has only 4,000 psychiatrists, general physicians need to be taught to manage basic psychiatry. Volatile patients need to be walled for a short duration and given the required medication so they don’t harm themselves and others.”
On papers, the Lampur shelter is run jointly with NGO Delhi Brotherhood Society. But, Father Solomon George, who runs the organisation, shares a different story. “Six years ago, the government was running the home for a crore. We reduced the budget to `30 to 40 lakh a year. We have been shelling out between `15 and 20 lakh every year since then and the government hasn’t contributed a penny in four years,” he discloses. The paint is chipping off, the doors are rusty, there’s seepage, and the bathrooms have poor drainage and a consequent stink.
The court sends mental patients every quarter and there is no designated space for them in this one. The situation is only slightly better in private homes. Meanwhile, the aged are heavily drugged and thrown outside temples, public hospitals and cremation grounds.
The last living lyric of the Beatles was ‘and in the end the love that you make will be the love that you take’. However, the music stops long before the breath and then just the breath can be heard, again and again till it’s gone.