FRONTIERS OF HISTORY

 

Coming of Age: Aging and its Global and Local Politics

Speaker: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Associate Professor, Sociomedical Sciences and History, Interim co-Director, Robert N. Butler, Columbia Aging Center, Columbia University, New York

 

Discussant: Rama Baru, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Chair: Mathew Cherian, Chief Executive Officer, Helpage India

 

The talk is based on Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s new book As the World Ages: The Making of a Demographic Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2018). The aging of populations worldwide is being projected as a new, ‘grey Tsunami’ and crisis for economies and societies. Just as fears of a ‘population explosion’ in the 1980s were a concern about too many dependent children on the planet to feed; population aging is made out to be a crisis of too many dependent, aged persons to care for that will burden economies and societies