Guntupalli & Pallikadarath

4 Responses to Guntupalli & Pallikadarath

1. Sangeetha Madhavan says:

   January 9, 2014 at 5:41 pm

   Piggy backing on the discussant comments about the need to consider quasi residence (living close to children if not the same household), the authors should look at the Mexico paper which does exactly this and finds important differences;

   Also, there is no mention of elderly pension (see South Africa paper)..
   • Aravinda Meera Guntupalli says:

     January 9, 2014 at 8:13 pm

     Good point. I would love to focus on quasi residence. As mentioned in my response to the reviewer, due to data limitations this cannot be addressed.

     Coming to the pensions, I also do not have any information. However, I am not worried about the impact of pensions on the living arrangements as India does not have a generous pension scheme unlike South Africa. Also, India does not social security programmes that are universal or accessed by majority of the population. As per the statistics of the Ministry of Finance, the contributory pension scheme covers only 12% of the working population and most of them receive a meagre amount.

     The ‘national pension scheme’ that covers older people aged 65 and is means tested and not more than 500 rupees unless one is 80 years or older. This amount might not provide an incentive for G2 to live with G1 because it is equivalent to less than one week’s wages for a farm labourer!

     I can address some of these points in the paper.
2. Aravinda Meera Guntupalli says:

   January 9, 2014 at 8:09 pm

   Thanks to the reviewer for the comments on the first draft of the paper. The paper is work is progress using the National Family Health Surveys and uses individual level data to create the generations. This has been the most challenging task. For households that have older people as head of the house, the relationship analysis is ‘slightly’ easier. For the households that have older people as residents, I have to restructure the relationships, which is not an easy task! Now that I have rearranged the relationships, the paper can progress further.

   Thanks for the suggestions on literature. I am yet to incorporate 20 papers that I have reviewed. I was spending most of my time reorganizing and rearranging the data to discuss the generational approach and for creating the conceptual framework. I can assure that the next version will include the suggested references and the additional references I have compiled.

   Thanks for the comment on the interpretation of changes in the percentage of households with older adults. I agree that it would be interesting to see the percentage of oldest old who are living in joint households between the two waves.

   I would love to answer the question of quasi-coresidence. Given the limitation of the data, I will explore other available options.

   I agree that the table showing the reversal of care could be improved. The discussion was based on work in progress which needs to be incorporated into the paper.

   I thank the reviewer for the time and thoughts!

   I want to stress that the aim of the paper is to show changing living arrangements using national level data rather than focusing on regional datasets that focus on older people. The datasets on older people are excellent in providing care specific questions. However, they might be limited due to regional focus. As I mentioned in the paper, the aim of the paper is to illustrate the phenomenon of self care and highlight the care reversal so that policy makers in India can focus on the care gaps!
   • Kathryn Yount says:

     January 12, 2014 at 7:04 pm

     Thank you all for a nice exchange. I have learned a lot, and I am wondering if this paper might contribute by making concrete recommendations to the DHS about how to account for quasi-coresidence. This would be a major contribution of the DHS to new methods in measuring families/households.