Chandigarh’s elder helpline needs more than fresh funds. It must be easy to reach and quick to respond. Picture a retired schoolteacher in Chandigarh who lives alone. Her children are abroad. A caller posing as her bank has just asked for an OTP. If she dials the Elder Line at 14567, the national helpline for senior citizens, no one will answer.
The city’s Elder Line has been silent since June 2025, reportedly due to the freezing of central funds under the Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana. Yet the funding freeze is only the last chapter. RTI data show that calls fell from 5,088 in 2022-23 to 2,600 in 2023-24 and to none in 2024-25. Calls appear to have stopped by December 2023, about 18 months before the formal suspension. The service was failing long before the money ran out.
Over the same two years, registered grievances fell from 744 to 48, and rescues and field interventions from 49 to nine. In 2022-23, about one in seven calls became a registered grievance. A year later, fewer than one in 50 did. This does not prove that callers were turned away. It does call for an audit of how calls were classified, recorded and followed up on. Either the service stopped helping, or it stopped recording the help it gave. Both are failures of accountability.
This matters because India is ageing fast. The India Ageing Report 2023 puts the share of people aged 60 and above at 10.5% of the population in 2022, rising to 20.8% by 2050. Many of Chandigarh’s pensioners have children in other cities or overseas. For them, a helpline is often the first resort when a public office is hard to navigate, a family matter turns difficult or a fraudster calls.
Reopening the call centre will not by itself bring callers back. An older person must first decide that the problem is worth reporting and that speaking up is safe. They must remember the number, get through and explain themselves, often while frail or distressed. A caller who gets no real response is unlikely to try again and will tell the neighbours so.
Publicity tells people that a number exists. It does little to make calling easier or to make help arrive. Small changes in the design of the service, the kind behavioural economists call nudges, can do both. Five deserve priority. First, no call should hit a dead end. Until the helpline is fully restored, calls to 14567 should be routed to an existing, staffed control room, with a clear protocol for referral to the social welfare department. A small contingency fund should keep essential services running when central releases are delayed. Second, silence should sound an alarm. Monthly call volumes, grievances, interventions and resolution times should be made public. A month of zero calls or a sustained fall below an agreed-upon threshold should trigger a documented review. A quiet helpline is a warning, not a sign that all is well.
Third, close the loop. Every complaint should receive a reference number and an update within 48 hours, with urgent cases escalated at once. Callers should know who is handling their case and what happens next. Fourth, make the number easy to reach. With consent, staff at pension camps, bank branches and health centres could save 14567 on older residents’ phones. Resident welfare associations, beat constables, pharmacists and postal workers can explain the service and help people make the call.
Fifth, reach out to those least able to reach in. A helpline that waits for the phone to ring will miss the people most at risk. Scheduled check-in calls to consenting older residents who live alone, with safeguards for their data and clear escalation steps, would give the service a preventive role.
Chandigarh’s compact size makes it a manageable place to try these changes. The revival should begin with a review of past call records and conversations with older residents and frontline staff, to find where callers gave up. Success should be measured by whether help arrives on time, complaints are resolved, and residents trust the service enough to call again. Restoring funds and staff is necessary but not enough. The real test of Elder Line 14567 is what happens after an older person picks up the phone.
(The writer, a professor at University Business School, Panjab University, leads the university’s NITI Aayog-supported project on skilling for elderly care. The views expressed are personal)