Good Morning Dear MMS Reader,
Whenever any sort of data around India’s population is released, there’s one subset that pretty much stays the same—the country has the world’s second-largest number of people in the 15-64 age bracket. The first, of course, is the China - the great.
This statistic is often quoted with much enthusiasm and optimism: a young workforce, earning and spending money, cranking the economy gear. What’s not to like?
But people grow old. Their wants and needs change. And as demographics slowly shift into the other end of the spectrum, there’s a whole array of policies that will also need to be tweaked. Would we need as many schools if there aren’t enough students to fill them? Hospitals will have to be equipped for the elderly, governments will have to design policies for eldercare. There may come a time when adult diapers sell more than baby diapers.
For Singapore, which has over 16% of the population in the 65+ age bracket, the shift is already here. The city-state’s ageing market is predicted to reach US$72.4 billion by 2025. This includes long-term care, homecare, community care, as well as nursing and assisted living. And a rapidly ageing country, when met with a deadly pandemic, makes a great case for homecare.
A report on long-term care (LTC) in the city-state showed that there was a jump of up to 20% in home nursing and a 25-50% growth in home medical care among 21 LTC operators during the pandemic. The eldercare product market is booming. Homecare tech operators have stepped up. There are wheelchair-friendly transport services making a killing. And not content to sit back and see market forces take over, Singapore’s Ageing Planning Office is also focusing on ‘ageing-in-place’.
While this is a rapidly growing market, it’s also an expensive market. For instance, dementia care is “among the biggest drains on the healthcare system”, costing Singapore over US$1 billion a year. And while there’s a range of government subsidies and schemes available, the key to tackle this lies elsewhere. As our motherland, India grows older, maybe it has more in common with Singapore than it realises #yusufbhandarkar
