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The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE) officially launched the JEEVAN mobile application and the SHATAYU geriatric caregiver dashboard during a National Workshop in New Delhi — a significant policy intervention as India confronts the demographic reality of a rapidly ageing population. Both platforms are developed and managed by the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment.

The Demographic Imperative

India's elderly population (60 ) currently stands at approximately 149 million (2024) and is projected to reach 347 million by 2050 — nearly doubling its share of the total population. This demographic shift poses structural challenges: fragmented welfare delivery, an unorganised caregiving sector, social isolation, inadequate healthcare access, and digital exclusion of senior citizens. JEEVAN and SHATAYU are designed as twin digital solutions to these intersecting vulnerabilities.

JEEVAN: Joint Elderly Empowerment & Virtual Assistance Network

JEEVAN is a citizen-facing, single-window mobile application engineered specifically for senior citizens, with four core functions:

• Unified Welfare Gateway: Aggregates all active Central and State Government schemes, pension benefits, and healthcare entitlements for seniors — eliminating the need for elderly users to navigate multiple departmental portals.
• SOS Emergency Matrix: A simplified, high-visibility one-touch panic button that directly connects elderly users to local emergency services, medical networks, and the national elder helpline — critical for seniors living alone or in low-support environments.
• Institutional Home Locator: Provides geo-tagged, verified listings of all MoSJE-supported senior citizen welfare homes and day-care centres — enabling families to make informed placement decisions.
• Elder-Centric Accessibility Design: Built with large text fonts, voice-assisted navigation, and simplified screen interactions — explicitly addressing the sensory and motor limitations of older users, a dimension typically ignored in mainstream app design.

SHATAYU: Senior Holistic Care Assistance and Training For Your Utility

SHATAYU is a centralised, data-driven national dashboard targeting the supply side of India's eldercare ecosystem — the geriatric caregiver workforce:

• District-Level Micro-Mapping: Enables real-time visibility of verified geriatric caregivers available within specific districts and states — allowing both families and state planners to identify and address care-supply gaps geographically.
• Standardised Training Trackers: Monitors caregiver skill progression, certification benchmarks, and training completion — formalising what has historically been an informal, unregulated domain.
• Care-Economy Integration Hub: Aggregates data from NGOs, medical skill councils, and ecosystem partners to balance supply-demand in the eldercare labour market — directly supporting India's emerging care economy framework.
• Verified Service Directory: Maintains a secure backend with validated caregiver credentials, background checks, and legal compliance records — addressing the safety and trust deficit that has long deterred families from accessing formal care services.

Policy Context

Both platforms align with the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens (Amendment) Act, 2019, which expanded the state's obligations toward elderly welfare, and the National Policy for Senior Citizens framework. They also complement existing schemes under ATAL VAYO ABHYUDAY YOJANA (AVYAY) — the umbrella scheme for senior citizen welfare under MoSJE.

SHATAYU's data-driven approach is particularly significant for Skill India Mission targeting — by exposing district-level caregiving deficits, it enables the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and healthcare skill councils to direct specialised geriatric care training camps to underserved rural and semi-urban regions.