ABSTRACT
Outwith Africa, means-tested old age pension schemes designed to provide protection for the destitute elderly are found across India. Initially, the introduction of means-tested old age pensions was legislated for at State level. In 1957, ‘Uttar Pradesh was the first to introduce such a general ‘old-age’ pensions scheme’. At a more basic level, Russian experience reminds us that cash incomes through pensions remain important to poor households in all countries however small these incomes are. Moreover, South African evidence also indicates that household size rises when even one member is in receipt of an old age pension, underlining the point that assistance pensions constitute a cost-effective mechanism for underpinning family solidarity at the household level. By providing regular cash incomes to the elderly, ‘pensions’ have the potential to form highly flexible instruments of social support, not simply providing much needed crisis-proofing for the assetless old but also with significant spread effects, thereby reducing vulnerability significantly across wider family groupings.
