Transforming representation into real change by 2029

In 2029, India will have the most gender-representative Parliament in its history. The Women’s Reservation Act will reserve one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha for women — the largest single expansion of political representation this country has ever legislated. This moment has been decades in the making. If the next three years are squandered, it will not deliver what it promises.

There is an immediacy

Representation without an agenda is just presence. The women who walk into Parliament in 2029 will change what gets discussed only if the issues that matter to them have already been named, fought for, and demanded loudly enough to become political priorities. That work cannot begin in 2029. It has to begin now. And there is no issue more urgent, more invisible, or more ready to be addressed than this: India lacks a policy framework for elder care that clearly accounts for women — and there is no political tradition of demanding one.

Gauri is one of millions of women in India for whom this is not a policy abstraction. Her eighty-three-year-old mother lives alone in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, ageing the way most Indian women do: quietly, trying to hold on to her innate dignity, with almost no support from the state. Gauri travels back when she can, handling immediate emergencies and worrying about the rest — like so many daughters and daughters-in-law who hold two worlds together simultaneously. What keeps Gauri up at night is not the exhaustion. It is the recognition that she could end up ageing like her mother the same way. And she is done accepting that quietly.

What Gauri wants, for her mother, and for herself, is a state that builds the guardrails for women to age with dignity. She wants elder care treated as public infrastructure, not private misfortune. And she wants to know that when she votes in 2029 for the most representative Parliament this country has ever elected, its representatives will already know what she needs.

An ageing India

India is ageing faster than its public conversation acknowledges. Over 100 million Indians are already above 60 years; that number will cross 250 million by the year 2040. Women will outlive men by four to five years on average, but those extra years have a compounded disadvantage: lower lifetime savings, broken employment histories, no assets in their own name, and no caregiver when they need one the most. The National Policy for Older Persons (1999) and the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme address the elderly through a lens of poverty and health, with no gender dimension. Ageing women are simply not a category the systems in India are built to recognise.

The cost of that invisibility is written in the numbers. A study, in 2023, in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, estimates that 8.8 million Indians over the age of 60 are living with dementia today, a number expected to nearly double by 2036 — with women disproportionately affected, more likely to be living alone when cognitive decline sets in, and less likely to have anyone looking out for them. This is what a state that never designed elder care around women actually produces. Parliamentary records reveal why it persists — the Parliamentary Questions database has virtually no questions on ageing women, there are no private member Bills, or committee attention. What Maharashtra showed recently is that the state can move quickly when it chooses to recognise the realities of women’s lives. In January 2026, the State launched menopause clinics across 580 government facilities, backed by decades of advocacy. The result was that over 31,000 women came forward in five weeks.

They had been waiting, in silence, for the State to name their reality. Elder care and dignified ageing wait for the same decision.

The need for insight

Political parties are already preparing candidate pipelines for the reserved seats. But fielding women is not the same as changing what Parliament talks about. The women and men who will make the Parliament of 2029 count are those who arrive having read the room — who understand that representing women means representing the full arc of their lives; not just the years of careers and children, but the decades that follow, when every gap the state has ignored becomes a daily reality. That understanding must be built into the candidate, the campaign, and the manifesto — through a census that captures age- and gender-disaggregated data, budgets that report elder care spending transparently, and parties that make dignified ageing a political commitment before the election, not after.

When Gauri votes in 2029, she will be thinking about all of this. She will be thinking about her mother, and about herself, and about whether this Parliament, the most representative in India’s history, can build the country that women like her were promised. Three years is enough time to get this right. We cannot afford to get it wrong.

Barkha Deva works on policy for dignified ageing and elder care