In an anticipation of the rising geriatric population in India, the Central government constituted the National Policy for Older Persons in 1999 to promote the health and welfare of senior citizens in India. A major strategy of this policy is to encourage families to take care of their older family members. The policy also encourages voluntary organizations to supplement the care provided by the family and provide care and protection to vulnerable elderly people. The implementation of this policy, particularly in the rural areas, has been negligible and calls for a scaling-up of programs to address the physical, psychological, and social needs of the poor. Due to breakdown of the joint family system and the migration of the younger generation to the towns and cities, the elderly parents in the villages are left to fend for themselves. Too old to work and with little or no source of income, the elders are struggling even to satisfy their basic needs. This article primarily focuses on the various facets of elderly care in India. As a fledgling nation in elderly care, we should take cues from other nations who have pioneered in this field and should constantly evolve to identify and face the various challenges that come up, especially from rural India. The Rural Unit for Health and Social Affairs Department of a well-known Medical College in South India has developed a “senior recreation day care” model which proves to be a useful replicable model to improve the quality of life and nutritional status of the elderly in the lower rungs of society. More than a decade since its inception, it is now the right time to assess the implementation of our geriatric health policy and scale-up programs so that the elderly in our country, irrespective of urban and rural, will have a dignified and good quality life.

Poor handling, storage, and application of agrochemicals have resulted in a steep rise in mortality and morbidity associated with their use. This study aimed at assessing the awareness of wives of farmers and farmworkers in rural Vellore on the use and health effects of agrochemicals to identify gaps in their knowledge. A cross-sectional survey among 512 wives was conducted. Nearly 75 percent of the wives (384/512) did not know that agrochemicals could pass through skin. Also, wives who owned between 1 and 5 acres of land had a higher odds of knowing that agrochemicals were harmful (OR: 1.71(1.03-2-85), p < 0.05) and need to be disposed safely (OR: 4.76 (1.47-15.36), p < 0.05), than those owning less than an acre or no land. There is a need to educate women associated with agriculture in India on the harms and proper use of agrochemicals in order to better protect and inform their households and communities.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a type of digital asset that represents a proof of ownership over a particular digital item such as art, music, or real estate. Due to the non-fungible nature of NFTs, duplicate tokens should not possess the same value. However, with the surge of new blockchains and a massive influx of NFTs being created, a wealth of NFT data is being generated without a method of tracking similarity. This enables people to create almost identical NFTs by changing one pixel or one byte of data. Despite the similarity among NFTs, each NFT is assigned a completely different token ID. To address the NFT duplication issue, we developed a modular, easily-extendable, hardware-agnostic, cloud-centered NFT processing system that represents NFTs as vectors. We established a database containing a vector representation of the NFTs in accordance with the Ethereum Request for Comment 721 (ERC-721) token standards to initiate the process of aggregating NFT data from various blockchains. Finally, we developed an NFT visualization dashboard application with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) to provide non-technical users access to the aggregated NFT data. The Universal NFT Vector Database is an off-chain framework for NFT data aggregation based on similarity, which provides an organized way to query and analyze NFT data that was previously unavailable through on-chain solutions.

This volume of papers explores the labor market characteristics of older workers and critiques the effectiveness of workforce programs in addressing the needs of this growing segment of our population. The volume grew out of a conference sponsored by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) and cochaired by Richard A. Hobbie of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, Susan M. Daniels of Daniels and Associates, and Gloria T. Johnson of the Labor Coalition for Community Action. The purpose of the conference was to assemble labor and public policy experts to focus on the recent experience of older workers, review current policies that address their needs, identify gaps in the current workforce programs, and offer recommendations on how to fi ll those gaps. The culmination of this effort is a collection of research that advances our understanding of the labor market experiences of older workers and points out some defi ciencies in our current workforce programs.This chapter attempts to frame the issues covered in this volume by offering a statistical look at the population of older workers and placing the papers into the larger context of the growing literature on older workers. We start with a brief look at the labor force trends of older workers and highlight signifi cant changes in older worker behavior over the recent past. We then provide an overview of the factors that may contribute to those changes as covered in the chapters included in the volume. Finally, we summarize the policy implications of these factors as suggested by the volume's contributors. Eberts and Hobbie LABOR FORCE TRENDS OF OLDER WORKERSOlder Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. The aging of the baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) in combination with steadily declining mortality rates and progressively lower birth rates has contributed to a growing share of the population being between the ages of 45 and 64. Projections show that as the baby boom reaches this age range in 2010, the number of 45-to 64-year-olds will have increased by 29.7 percent. Their percentage of the total population will have risen from 22 to 26 percent, and their percentage of the working-age population will be 34 percent. The total population increase over the 10-year period from 2000 to 2010 is projected to be 9.5 percent, or less than one-third of the 29.7 percent population growth for the boomers (U.S. Census Bureau 2004). Yet their growing importance is not expected to stop there: longer life expectancy and lower fertility rates mean that the average age of the population will continue to rise. Figure 1.1 shows life expectancy at birth for selected years from 1955 to 2050 (projected), as well as the fertility rate during those same years. Figure 1.2 displays the results of the trends seen in Figure 1.1, namely the increasing share of older segments of the population. The latter fi gure clearly illustrates that, whereas in 1990 the population was "bottom-heavy" (the youngest segments having a larger prop...