Indian Joint Family the Indian Social Security System

Abstract

Indian society was collectivist in its structure where people stayed in joint or extended families, these joint families were large sets of people living together under one roof being governed by the family elder whether a male or a female. The Indian joint family promoted socio-economic interdependence. These families were driven by a similar set of values, norms, or mores, and they were guided by shared beliefs, traditions, and customs which, has proved to be a remarkable resource for the care of children, aged, terminally ill or even unemployed of the family.
With the rapidly changing socio-political, economic scene: globalization, rapid urbanization, and rise in the numbers of female workers, fragmentation of large joint families has taken place giving rise to nuclear families in India, which has led to erosion of earlier family values, there appears to be an urgent need to reexamine the values which were propounded by family structures.
The western world has been able to develop a social security system wherein its old, ailing, feeble and marginalized are taken care of, by state-owned and run, Health care systems i.e. NHS ( National Health Service) in England or Universal Health Coverage in France. Many other countries have their own systems to take care of their less fortunate members of the society.
In the absence of any such system in India, the paper proposes to examine the role of joint family in looking after the older people, maternity issues and child care, as existed in the earlier framework of Joint family system.