According to this Indian Catholic article, “The Lok Sabha on Wednesday night passed a historic bill that makes it compulsory for children and grandchildren to take care of their parents.”
It used to be that families stayed together, and helped take care of each other. But it seems our capitalistic world has good reasons to work for an individualistic society where families are split up as much as possible. More resources and goods are needed the more divided families become. Businesses benefit from this because they have more people they can sell to, more units to make a profit from. In this way, one can say that large families, extended or otherwise, tend to be more ecologically sound, even if they are not economically beneficial to a capitalistic society, because they share more of the same goods and services together, and parents with many children tend to recycle clothing and other accessories, moving them from child to child.
Now, I would like it if society could go back to the time when large, extended families worked together and stayed together. But I agree with the concerns shown about this law in the article: if we take care of the elderly just because it is required for us to do so by law, it is likely that our elderly will suffer. Just as children these days end up being neglected by their parents, so it is likely that the elderly will be neglected, and the consequences of this will be dire (to say the least).
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