India’s Ageing Population: Building a Skilled, Gender-Sensitive Care Economy

Policy shift: From household obligation to an economic activity

According to the supplied report, Budget 2026–27 announced training for 1.5 lakh caregivers aligned with the National Skills Qualifications Framework. The source also describes NITI Aayog’s August 2026 report as framing caregiving as an economic activity rather than merely welfare work.

This approach recognises that care requires skills, time and institutional support. However, an announced training target is not evidence of completed training, employment or service availability. Similarly, the National Caregiver Council discussed in the report is envisaged, not established on the evidence supplied.

• Workforce policy must connect training with certification, decent employment and affordable services.
• Unpaid family caregivers need recognition and support alongside the expansion of paid care.
• Care demand must be assessed through functional needs, not age alone; older persons are not a uniformly dependent group.

Training priorities: Safe care, mental health and clinical boundaries

Informal caregivers often learn through crises rather than structured instruction. A national curriculum should cover assistance with daily living, safe mobility, observation of warning signs, medication-support routines, emergency response and referral. Training must clarify that caregivers assist with prescribed care and do not independently diagnose illness or alter treatment.

The source stresses the emotional and behavioural dimensions of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Communication, dementia-sensitive care, psychological support and caregiver wellbeing should therefore accompany physical-care protocols.

• Use supervised practical assessment rather than attendance-based certification alone.
• Include consent, privacy, dignity and recognition of elder abuse in training.
• Provide local-language modules and refresher training for both professional and family caregivers.
• Offer recognition of prior learning while assessing actual competence and addressing skill gaps.

Gender justice: Recognise, reduce and redistribute unpaid care

The source describes a disproportionate care burden on women within smaller households. When care remains invisible, its costs are absorbed through lost earnings, reduced rest and constrained participation in education or employment. Training women alone, without changing responsibility-sharing, could professionalise the task while preserving its unequal distribution.

A gender-sensitive approach should recognise unpaid work, reduce avoidable drudgery through accessible services and redistribute responsibilities among men, women, communities, employers and the State. The source’s suggestion of training more than one family member offers a practical route towards shared responsibility.

• Encourage men’s participation in both family caregiving and professional care occupations.
• Provide respite services so that family caregivers can rest, work or attend to their own health.
• Explore caregiver-sensitive social protection without treating continued unpaid care as women’s default duty.
• Ensure that care-sector employment offers fair remuneration, safe conditions and grievance redress.

Delivery architecture: Build on local institutions without overburdening them

The source identifies Kerala’s Kudumbashree K4 Care programme and elderly-care training for ASHA workers as existing entry points. K4 Care was launched in February 2024; the source reports 838 course completions. It also notes that the National Health Systems Resource Centre has prepared an elderly-care training manual for ASHAs, but publicly available granular information on training completion is lacking.

These initiatives offer potential platforms for expansion, not proof of a nationally validated model. Appropriately trained personnel could support a trainer network, provided additional responsibilities are accompanied by supervision, remuneration and workload safeguards. ASHAs should not be treated as substitutes for a dedicated long-term care workforce.

An envisaged National Caregiver Council could help standardise curricula, certification and a caregiver registry. Such an arrangement would still require clear legal authority, coordination with States and local institutions, data-protection safeguards and effective complaint mechanisms.

• Integrate home-based support with primary healthcare, rehabilitation and hospital referral.
• Provide assisted offline access alongside any digital caregiver portal.
• Assess affordability and rural access before treating workforce expansion as service expansion.
• Measure care quality, retention and user experience, not certification totals alone.