Why India needs an empathy education for its loneliness crisis

The AICTE and UGC could mandate structured and graded interaction with the elderly (a conversation, a visit, or a documented exchange) as a measurable learning outcome | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockPhoto Two recent news items deserve more attention than they have received. Once was about the death of an elderly man at an old-age home in Haryana. His last rites were performed by the staff and volunteers because his children were in other cities and could not get to the place in time. They watched the funeral on video call and had his ashes immersed in the Ganga on their behalf. Another report from Bengaluru was about the discovery of the skeletal remains of a woman who had been dead for almost a year. She had lost her husband and son earlier and was not in touch with any of her family members.I raise these not to judge the individuals involved, since families carry burdens a headline cannot capture. but because, together, these are symptoms of a loneliness crisis in a country that imagines itself as the the custodian of civilisational values thousands of years old.It is tempting to blame the pandemic and social distancing certainly hardened habits of remove among the young. But the deeper rot runs through how we raise and educate children. Ageism, today, is not the province of a few unfeeling individuals, but an ambient cultural mood, particularly among the younger working generation. To listen to or defer to someone older is treated less as wisdom-seeking than as a dent in one’s street cred. Age has stopped signalling authority and started signalling irrelevance.Empathy begins earlyNone of this happens in a vacuum. What we tolerate as classroom behaviour becomes what we practise as adults: a child never asked to sit with discomfort or serve others without reward grows into an adult who sees ageing parents as an inconvenience. This is not new. The old Tamil grammar text Nannool observes that it is not wrong for the old to depart and the new to take their place; the passing of a generation is not itself a moral failure. What matters is how the old are let go of. A generation that turns from its elders with indifference is not merely unkind; it loosens its grip on the inheritance that made it legible to itself.I do not raise this to lament for laments change nothing. The more useful question is what our education system, which shapes character long before it shapes careers, should be doing differently.First, at the primary level, we might take a lesson from Japan’s tokkatsu system: the daily practice of children cleaning their own classrooms, serving each other lunch, and running small collective tasks. Not as punishment but as curriculum. It is character formation by repetition, not lecture. Discipline and shared responsibility built into the school day, alongside academics rather than crowded out by them. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 gestures in this direction with its emphasis on holistic learning and mandatory community service. The policy framework exists, what is missing is the will to make it real in the timetable. Value education exists on paper but rarely in practice. It needs real, evaluated projects, not recitation and empathy caught early rather than at college, when it is generally too late.Second, in higher education, in both English and regional literature, we under-use a powerful tool for building empathy: narrative itself. A well-chosen poem, story, or novel can show a young reader, with an immediacy no lecture matches, what a neglected life looks like without their having to live it. Literature lets us borrow others’ suffering safely, so we might recognise and prevent it in the world around us.Third, and most concrete, the AICTE and UGC could mandate structured and graded interaction with the elderly (a conversation, a visit, or a documented exchange) as a measurable learning outcome. The NEP already commits institutions to community service as part of holistic education. Visits to the elderly — credited and assessed — are an overdue extension of that commitment, not charity. What gets measured gets done, what stays a suggestion may be skipped.One fact unites every stakeholder here: everyone ages, including the policymakers deciding whether any of this happens. The AICTE and UGC officials debating these outcomes today will, in time, be the elderly this system either serves or abandons. What a video-call cremation and a silent skeleton in a locked house both ask of us is not whether India’s elderly deserve better, but whether the country now being educated will still know how to give it to them.The writer is Assistant Professor of English (Grade-II), Velammal Engineering College, Chennai. Published - August 26, 2026 10:32 am IST