The Scam Called Active Senior Living

Several companies are, of late, promoting communities for seniors above 60 where one can purchase an apartment and the company provides facilities for food, healthcare, recreation etc. These are NOT to be confused with 'Old Age Homes' run mostly for destitute old people often on charitable basis. Many seniors of today, especially those who have built up a comfortable retirement corpus, prefer to stay in such communities rather than burdening their children (who are already under various stresses of today's life with many of them residing outside India). The colourful project brochures make the community life look very attractive, but the actual implementation puts people in the final phase of their life to a whole lot of new kinds of stresses.

The companies build the entire project including common facilities with the funds provided by the buyers but register only the apartment and a small undivided land share (which is based on the footprint of the apartment building and nothing else) while executing the sale. All the common land and facilities built thereupon remain with the company (for which the company has spent nothing). In normal apartments built under a cooperative society model, the common facilities/land passes on the cooperative society which takes over and continues to manage them but not in these senior communities. The companies refuse to recognise any association of owners (even those registered as a society) or hand over the ownership of the common properties.

The seniors are obligated during the purchase to enter into a maintenance and service agreement with the company (or a service providing subsidiary) which is perpetual. Even under extreme cases of non-performance, the agreement cannot be dissolved or a new maintenance contractor/service provider appointed.

Often, the companies sell these (illegally or improperly acquired) common assets and service-providing responsibilities to third parties which run them as profit-oriented businesses. They often increase the charges for their services and the food bills arbitrarily and force the owner-occupiers to pay such inflated fees. The government, on its part gets a steep share of its loot in the form of GST on the service bills. Since many of the owners are not government pensioners with ever-increasing pensions and have to live a carefully budgeted existence, this makes the life in these communities very stressful and precarious.

A regulatory framework is necessary to ensure peace of mind to seniors who have worked hard during their active life with the hopes of having a comfortable end-of-life experience, but the greedy businesses who manage these for-profit facilities end up making life impossible for vulnerable seniors. more