Baby Boomers

The post-war baby boom was a specific demographic event in particular countries. India's demographic history is different: high birth rates well before and well after that period, a decline beginning much later, and a population that remains young by comparison. There is no Indian cohort corresponding to the boom, and the boundaries drawn at 1946 and 1964 mark nothing here.

What follows from that is worth stating plainly, because HR content copied from Western sources assumes otherwise.

• The Indian workforce skews young, and the proportion of employees over sixty is small in most sectors.
• Retirement removes people from this cohort in the Indian workforce faster than the Western commentary assumes, because the customary retirement age here is lower than in many of the countries the term comes from.
• Descriptions of boomers as a large block of workers delaying retirement, common in American workforce writing, do not describe most Indian organisations.
• The generational descriptions that follow the label, about attitudes to loyalty, technology or hierarchy, are contested even where the demography holds and have no evidential basis when transplanted.

The useful questions are about career stage and role, not birth year.

• They are disproportionately in senior and specialist roles, so their departure removes decision-making context that is not written down anywhere.
• They hold relationships, with regulators, auditors, vendors and long-standing customers, which transfer only if someone deliberately transfers them.
• They are the group most affected by retirement administration, which is where the organisation's obligations are concrete: gratuity, provident fund settlement, pension or annuity paperwork, and insurance cessation.
• They are frequently candidates for post-retirement engagement as consultants or advisers, which is a re-engagement decision with its own classification questions rather than a continuation of employment.
• They are the population where health-related accommodation questions arise most, and those are handled under the disability and accommodation framework rather than as a generational matter.

• Retirement age in India is not fixed by a single rule for all employment. It comes from the appointment letter, the standing orders or service rules where they apply, the applicable state legislation, or the rules of the establishment, and it differs between sectors and between government and private employment.
• State the age in the appointment letter or the applicable rules, because retiring someone at an age that appears nowhere in their terms is a termination rather than a retirement.
• Where employment continues past the stated retirement age, do so on documented terms rather than by silence, since an undocumented continuation raises questions about what the terms now are.
• Start the settlement paperwork months ahead. Gratuity, provident fund and pension or annuity processing take time, and a retiring employee left with a gap in income is a failure of administration rather than of policy.
• Confirm nominations are current and in the prescribed form well before the date. This is the point at which an out of date nomination causes the most damage.
• Plan the knowledge transfer as work, with named recipients and a schedule, in the final months rather than the final week.

Verify the retirement age position under the applicable standing orders, state legislation and the terms of employment, and the gratuity and provident fund settlement requirements under the Code on Social Security, 2020, before planning a retirement.

One statutory point is fixed even though the retirement age is not. Under section 53 of the Code on Social Security, gratuity is payable on termination after not less than five years of continuous service, and superannuation and retirement are among the events that trigger it, alongside resignation, death and disablement. Section 54 governs how continuous service is computed, and counts days actually worked together with days laid off and days on leave with full wages earned in the previous year. The provident fund and pension positions on attaining a given age, and the nomination formalities, are not stated here: those provisions have not been checked against the enacted text.

Generational language is mostly harmless in a presentation and harmful in a decision.

• Describing a role as suited to a younger team, or filtering candidates by graduation year, is age filtering with an extra step.
• Excluding older employees from training or from roles involving new systems, on an assumption about technology, is a decision made on a stereotype rather than an assessment.
• Selecting for redundancy or restructuring in a way that concentrates on older employees invites scrutiny, and the reasons recorded at the time are what will be examined.
• Assessment and selection criteria have to relate to the requirements of the post, which an assumption about a birth cohort does not.
• Where health or capability is genuinely relevant to a role, it is assessed individually, with accommodation considered, rather than inferred from age.

The practical guidance is to drop the cohort labels from internal documents. They add nothing an accurate description of the role or the career stage does not, and they leave a trail of language that reads badly when a decision is questioned.

Two things are worth being exact about in the disability framework, because entries on this subject routinely blur them. Section 20 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment, binds government establishments. What binds every establishment, private ones included, is section 21, the duty to notify an equal opportunity policy, and section 22, the duty to maintain records of persons with disabilities in relation to employment and the facilities provided. Section 3(3) states the general prohibition on discriminating on the ground of disability, subject to a justification route. Reasonable accommodation is defined at section 2(y) as necessary and appropriate modification and adjustment, without imposing a disproportionate or undue burden.