Introduction

Chennai, a highly dense and growing city of 4.7 million people, is a particularly apt context for studying three global processes that are having greater impacts on developing countries than on developed countries. The first process, population ageing, is growing fastest in developing countries, which are already home to two thirds of the world's people aged 60 and over, and after China and the United States, India has the largest global population of people aged 80 and above (over 11 million) (UN DESA, 2015, pp 9, 17). Second, the rate of urbanisation in developing countries is much faster than in developed countries. Ninety per cent of the world's urban population growth will happen in Asia and Africa, such that by 2050 52% of the urban population will be located in Asia. India currently has the world's second largest urban population at 410 million people (UN DESA, 2014, pp 11-12). Third, developing countries are increasingly drawn into the global economy where pre-existing inequalities are deepening (UN DESA, 2005, 2013; Ortiz and Cummins, 2011).

Chennai provides an example of where developing cities might be headed. It is located within the Chennai Metropolitan Area, comprising 8.9 million people living in Chennai city and its suburbs, and is located within the state of Tamil Nadu, which is the most highly urbanised state in India. It is not only India's fourth largest metropolitan agglomeration, but also one of the fastest growing metropolitan economies. A by-product of Chennai's prodigious growth is that nearly 30% of its population lives in slums (Chandramouli, undated). In a city with a literacy rate of 90% (Census of India, undated a), these slum dwellers demonstrate that education is now widely accepted; consequently, the child labour rate has seen a rapid decline since the 1980s, though the absolute number of child labourers remains large (Kak and Pati, 2012). Alongside high levels of urbanisation, Tamil Nadu's fertility rate has fallen below replacement level (Government of India, 2011a), resulting in a rapidly growing age band of over-60s (10.4% of the state population, that is, over 7.5 million people) and an even faster growing 80+ age band (1.03%, about 750,000 people) (Census of India, undated b). By comparison India's over 60 population represents only 8.6% of the total population. As of 2011, life expectancy in Tamil Nadu is 69 years for men and 72 years for women (Census of India, undated c).