Sheilu Sreenivasan

Sheilu Sreenivasan founded Dignity Foundation in Mumbai in 1995 and has spent three decades arguing that old age in India should be treated as a productive stage of life rather than a period of dependence.

She took a master's degree in psychiatric social work at Madras University and a doctorate in sociology at the University of Mumbai, and was teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences when the subject took hold of her. Watching her mother-in-law through a terminal illness had already shown her what elder care involved; the decisive moment came at Frankfurt airport, where a duty manager asked her to help an elderly Indian woman who had been abandoned in transit without money, papers or a language she could use. Sreenivasan resigned from TISS on her return and set about building an organisation for older people.

It began not as a service but as a magazine. Dignity Dialogue, launched in 1995, was written for and largely by senior citizens, and the readership it gathered became the constituency from which the Foundation grew. The programmes that followed were designed around isolation as much as poverty: Chai Masti neighbourhood groups, loneliness mitigation centres, geriatric and dementia day care, shelter homes, a senior citizens' helpline, a mobile physiotherapy van and midday meals. She also ran skills workshops through which older people in areas such as Jogeshwari and Mankhurd make and sell goods from recycled material, on her principle that age and productivity are not mutually exclusive, and campaigned for the state to issue identity cards to senior citizens.[2][3]