GARHMUKTESHWAR, India — They were found in gutters, on streets, in bushes. They were boarded on trains, deserted in hospitals, dumped at temples. They were sent away for being sick or outliving paychecks or simply growing too old.

By the time they reached this home for the aged and unwanted, many were too numb to speak. Some took months to mouth the truth of how they came to spend their final days in exile.

“They said, ‘Taking care of him is not our cup of tea,’ ” says Amirchand Sharma, 65, a retired policeman whose sons left him to die near the river after he was injured in an accident. “They said, ‘Throw him away.’ ”

In its traditions, in its religious tenets and in its laws, India has long cemented the belief that it is a child’s duty to care for his or her aging parents. But in a land known for revering its elderly, a secret shame has emerged: A burgeoning population of older people abandoned by their own families.

This is a country where grandparents routinely share a roof with children and grandchildren, and where the expectation that the young care for the old is so ingrained in the national ethos that nursing homes are a relative rarity and hiring caregivers is often seen as taboo. But expanding lifespans have brought ballooning caregiving pressure, a wave of urbanization has driven many young far from their home villages and a creeping Western influence has begun eroding the tradition of multigenerational living.

Courtrooms swell with thousands of cases of parents seeking help from their children. Footpaths and alleys are crowded with older people who now call them home. And a cottage industry of nonprofits for the abandoned has sprouted, operating a growing number of shelters that continually fill.

This is one of them.

The Saint Hardyal Educational and Orphans Welfare Society, known as SHEOWS, houses about 320 people on 16 acres of land in this small north Indian city. Nearly all of them were abandoned by their families.

One woman spent more than eight years living at a faraway temple where she was deserted by her children. Another tells of a son she loved who forced her out, saying if she didn’t leave, his wife would. A man sitting atop a bed with sheets adorned with teddy bears and smiling anthropomorphic mushrooms was left to die on the street, arriving here so starved that he ate 22 rotis, one after another after another.

Birbati, the lead caregiver in the women’s building, who does not use a surname, says after years of tending to the abandoned, she finds some of them visiting in her dreams.

“Each of them has a story,” she says. “All are sad stories.”

Where growing old is new

Wealthy countries have grappled with aging societies for decades, but the issue is only now beginning to ripple in the developing world, where the idea of growing old is still new for swaths of the population.

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population of people 60 and older will reside outside the world’s wealthiest nations. India is projected to see growth among its old that far outstrips that of the young.

By tradition, Indian parents live with a son, who is responsible for their care, though in practice the work typically falls to women. That remains the norm, but a growing number of older Indians now have absentee children and inadequate help to keep up with expenses or care. Others feel forced to leave homes where toxic feuds fester. And, in the worst cases, parents are ousted from their home by a child in a dispute over money or in a wits-end solution to incontinence they can’t stomach or dementia they can’t handle.

Driven from their homes, these elders end up begging on the streets or, if they’re lucky, in a shelter like this, where separate buildings for men and women overlook a sun-soaked lawn with towering palms and a fountain ringed by rosebushes. Monkeys crisscross the roof of an on-site hospital while inside, in its small physical therapy room, a doctor tries to coax a patient’s arthritic knees to work.

The patient, Rajhu Phooljale, has his black pants rolled up, and around his right ankle, he has tied black thread to ward off evil. He says he is 65, but like many older Indians, isn’t certain of his age.

How he ended up here, though, he can’t forget.

Phooljale was working as a cook and living with his wife and two adult sons when he was hit by a motorist and left initially unable to walk and permanently blinded. He could not work. His wife left him.

His sons told him they arranged for surgery in New Delhi, far from their home in the country’s center, and when they arrived at the hospital, they told him to sit while they went off to consult a doctor.

“Wait here,” they said. But they never returned.

For two or three days, Phooljale stayed on the grounds of a hospital in a strange city in a world that, for a man newly blind, had just gone black. He went hungry and thirsty and broke down in tears. A hospital staffer eventually called the police, who in turn alerted SHEOWS, which picked him up.

It has been about two years since then and Phooljale has not heard anything from his sons. He doesn’t even have a photograph of them. He wonders if they think he is dead.

“I nurtured them from the time they were small,” he says. “Isn’t it their duty to take care of me?”

Scouring the streets

In New Delhi, about 60 miles and a world away from the dirt roads of Garhmukteshwar, a two-man SHEOWS crew inches an ambulance through the capital’s choked thoroughfares, where cows amble beside clusters of tuk-tuks and vendors pile their carts high with perfectly stacked fruit.

On streets overflowing with humanity, there is no shortage of heartache and, with traffic snarled, the men study the streets’ edges looking for signs of someone old and in need.

Some approached by the ambulance’s driver, Rinku Semar, and his partner, Avanish Kumar, refuse to go with them. Others appear drunk or drugged and are disqualified from being taken to one of SHEOWS’ shelters.

As an orange sun descends in a hazy sky, they pick up a man named Atmaram whose jeans and shirt are worn and dirty and who drags a sack with a blanket and his other belongings.

Atmaram doesn’t use a surname and doesn’t know his age. A few white hairs sprout from his nearly bald head, his left eye is clouded by cataracts and most of his teeth are gone.

The ambulance arrives at SHEOWS’ newest shelter, where seesaws and swings hint at the property’s former life as a school.

Atmaram is shown to a shower, where the pool of water beneath him turns brown as a caregiver scrubs his legs with a pink bar of soap. Both men are silent.

The stories of the abandoned are often incomplete, riddled with holes punched by time, their reticence and, sometimes, the fog of dementia. Atmaram is no different and, this night, has no explanation for why he was living on the street.

Basic questions, such as whether he has any children, are unanswered.

Some clues drip out in the days to come: He used to make clay pots. He and his brother shared a home with their respective wives. His wife died, then his brother. Then, his sister-in-law forced him out.

“This house is not yours,” he says she told him.

Few who arrive here will ever see their families again.

“They say, ‘He’ll come back one day,’ ” says Saurabh Bhagat, 35, the leader of SHEOWS, the organization his father founded. “But almost none of them ever come back.”

‘How can children do this?’

Though most who are taken in by SHEOWS come from New Delhi’s streets and spend time in one of the organization’s city shelters, in time most end up here, at its largest site in Garhmukteshwar.

The center’s staffers are a stand-in for absent families and are quick with a caring touch or extra helping of food. And as caregivers’ years here pass, each amasses memories of cases that haunt them.

The old man whose leg was so infested with maggots he spent a month hospitalized. The woman who looked like a skeleton when she was found shivering in the bushes on a winter day that would be her last. A man with dementia often seen crying but unable to say why.

“How can children do this?” the home’s manager, Naved Khan, 30, asks in disbelief.

SHEOWS has taken in 10,000 people since its founding, but there is no reliable tally of India’s total population of abandoned elders. In cities across the country, organizations that care for the abandoned say a simmering decades-old problem has grown far worse in recent years.

SHEOWS opened a second shelter, then a third, then a fourth. Similar organizations have done the same, some with the backing of billionaire philanthropists like Azim Premji and MacKenzie Scott.

The problem has only continued to grow.

It comes even as India, now the world’s most populous country, has experienced decades of phenomenal growth in which billionaires were made but inequities also deepened.

The backgrounds of many here might be surprising, including academics, businesspeople and professionals. SHEOWS residents are more likely to hail from middle-class families than poor ones.

Still, economics are a major driver of abandonment. Most older people in India do not receive a pension, government assistance or health insurance, and families are often looked to for support.

Left to die alone

Neatly planted rows of vegetables cut across the Garhmukteshwar property’s midsection, a limp Indian flag comes to life with a breeze, and a wall along the perimeter is painted with messages of hope.

“Keep Smiling.” “Love and Respect Old Age People.” “Be Happy & You’ll Fly.”

Places like this weren’t supposed to be needed.

Parliament passed the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act in 2007 to ensure grown children and grandchildren provide for their aged relatives.

India’s Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, which oversees the law, has not released data on the number of claims it has received. One mid-size state, Kerala, said in 2022 that its dozens of tribunals had processed some 20,000 cases since the law’s passage, a microcosm of the national total.

Surveys show the majority of seniors are unaware of their rights under the maintenance act. Even if they do know, many are unlikely to take their kin to court.

Bhagat says he’s not aware of a single resident of his shelters who has pursued a case. Many concede their fates and remain protective of the children who have deserted them.

A feeling of acceptance is pervasive here.

Most who arrive here end up staying several years. Some have been here since it opened.

Tucked in one corner of the center’s hospital are piles of folders, one for each resident, stashed in cubbies. Each amounts to an individual’s history here, beginning with where they were found.

One pile is of those whose son or daughter came back for them, filled out paperwork for their release and pressed a purple thumbprint on it to make it official. But far more files grow fat and tattered until one final insertion is made, a thin strip of grid paper with the flat lines of an EKG.

It is left unsaid when someone arrives here: More than likely, this is the place they will die.

When it happens, caregivers bathe and dress the dead, then take the body to the river, where they rub it in ghee and set it aflame. No family will come to mourn them, and no words of remembrance are spoken.

A bed is freed, and soon a new resident arrives.