ORF-UNFPA Inception Workshop: Social Security and Ageing in India

India’s demographic profile is changing rapidly. Over the next two decades, the country will see a sharp rise in the share of older adults, alongside widening regional differences in ageing, income security and care needs. This creates an urgent need for an evidence-based social protection architecture that can ensure dignity, economic security and basic wellbeing for older persons, particularly those who are dependent. The ORF-UNFPA partnership seeks to generate actionable, data-driven guidance for a national Social Security Fund aligned with the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047, linking questions of distributive justice, gender equity and long-term fiscal resilience. The programme will examine how India can design and finance social security in a way that is both equitable and sustainable as workforce ratios decline and care needs rise.

Phase 1 of this work focuses on establishing an empirically grounded estimate of the financing envelope required to secure what may be defined as “decent living” for India’s dependent elderly in the period 2045–2050. This includes (i) projecting the size and structure of India’s ageing population across those years, (ii) defining and costing a realistic basket of essentials -food, housing and utilities, health and care, connectivity and social participation - with attention to gender-specific needs, and (iii) translating those costs into lifecycle deficit estimates using the National Transfer Accounts (NTA) approach. The output of Phase 1 will be a detailed paper on the size of the Social Security Fund required for Viksit Bharat, along with a transparent methodological base to inform later work on institutional design, financing mechanisms (including public-private-philanthropic models), and state-level tailoring.