During the second half of the previous century, unprecedented changes and cataclysmic upheavals have come about in our lives on account of technological innovations and a paradigm shift in our thinking related to social sciences, economics and management sciences, the consequences of which are being slowly realized now. The problem of old age security is a direct fallout of those changes. The author analyzes these situations here.

Transformation from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and an explosive growth in communications and transportation have catapulted the developing and the underdeveloped countries into a kind of surrealistic world, as though through a time warp. Confronted by overpowering economic compulsions, we have been uprooted from our social mores, unsettled from our cultural milieu and alienated from our spiritual values. Geopolitical changes, variations in global demographics, economic integration through globalization and a kind of democratic distribution of the benefits of technological innovations has thrown up new and unanticipated challenges. The crisis of old age security and problems of pension provision is a result of all the aforementioned factors.

It is important to have a holistic perception of the crisis of old age security rather than to purely view it as an economic or financing/accounting issue. The malady is more deep-rooted than it is made out to be. Exposure to media and access to information have led to a mindset where the luxuries of the past generation have become dire necessities of the present one. The media, advertisement and all other means of communication seem to be pandering to the acquisitive instincts of people and there is a deliberate attempt to blur the demarcating line between right and wrong, need and greed, and the moral and the legal. Means do not matter anymore. Ill-gotten wealth is flaunted brazenly in the face of a helpless government and a hapless populace. The stark truth in the statement reveals the poignancy of contemporary human condition and the degeneracy in human values: "In our days we used to love people and use things, now we love things and use people." We have extended the `use and throw' culture to human beings and all personal relationships.

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