Sub-collector Dr Adeela Abdulla team settling disputes involving elderly

KOCHI: At first, there are tears. A man is crying. Dr Adeela Abdulla offers a box of tissues. Her voice is soft. She hears him out patiently, lets him vent. He talks of a wife and son he is afraid to live with, and a daughter that died. He waves a file of documents and says he has not sold out properties like they said. The wife and son are on either side, sitting quietly. They talk once the man leaves the room. He is an alcoholic, fought with the daughter, fought with his brother, kicked the wife and son out of the house five years ago and they live in a shed.

Dr Adeela calls the man back into the room and let them all talk. She tells them to live together and the man shakes his head, ‘No’. Her voice rises when he is persistent. “You will listen to me”, she says. And there is peace. That’s a typical case hearing of a senior citizen dispute at the office of the sub collector and sub divisional magistrate in Fort Kochi. What has made it so quick is a bunch of people sitting at the back of the room, listening, passing on papers and one of whom accompanies the family going out.

The conciliation officers.
“There are 42 of them, trained to do the mediation. Volunteers, who get no money out of it, but feel self-motivated and empowered to deal with government files. It could be anyone. There are professional experts, retired professors, housewives, senior citizens themselves, college students,” Adeela says. Together, they unite abandoned old citizens with their families, after a lot of counseling and mediation.  It’s been about six months now. Adeela had spoken about it at public speeches and volunteers came forward. Quite a few volunteers came from the counseling and psychotherapy firm, Santhwana.

Help also came from an NGO- Magics and the Kerala Counsellors Forum. “We work on a project called Age Friendly Ernakulam,” says Bonny, one of the founders of Magics. “It is a WHO initiative to make cities friendly for senior citizens. We studied other countries where this was implemented, studied our cultural specificity and researched the results we could bring. It is when madam (Adeela) came to inaugurate one of our programmes she spoke of the idea of conciliation officers.” “They have had 30 hours of training from Advocate Sreelal Warrier, international mediation trainer, and two mediators Reghunandanan and Sadhana Kumari,” Adeela says.

Geriatrics is one subject where there are a lot of grey areas. “Kerala has the maximum aging population and 14 per cent of the senior citizens in Ernakulam district are at old age homes. A comprehensive law is needed”, she says. There is The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007. A senior citizen, including parent unable to maintain himself from his own earning or out of the property owned by him, shall be entitled to make an application at the tribunal. The obligation of the children or relative, as the case may be, to maintain a senior citizen (or parent) extends to the needs of such citizen so that the senior citizen (or parent) may lead a normal life.

Conciliation officers spend hours mediating, making house visits, studying the case and trying to solve it. When the case comes to her table, Adeela calls the whole family – mother, father and children. She hears them out, offering soft words of comfort sometimes, raising voice at other times. Sometimes she may have to threaten them. About losing property? She has the power to do that, to nullify a property transfer if proved forceful. “But mostly we try and settle it. It is not easy. There could be abuse, so they have to keep checking. Once we found a man under house arrest. In such cases she’d ask the abusive child to leave the house”, said a conciliation officer.     About 20 cases are heard at one sitting a week, and they have been doing this for six months. “It is wonderful to see madam use the power to help people. I have been doing mediation for some time now, and I have seen how people with power misuse it,” says a volunteer, who doesn’t wish to be named. “End of the day, our aim is to unite families".