At the recently held ASLI senior living conclave, V.K. Paul, a NITI Aayog member, made a simple but significant point: “Lifespan must match healthspan—that is our goal.”
He pointed out that at the time of Independence, life expectancy in India was around 32 years and today, it is about 71. But healthy life expectancy—the number of years we can expect to live in reasonably good health—is only around 60. That gap is where India’s next longevity challenge lies.
“The Viksit Bharat tentative goal is to push healthy life expectancy from 60 to 75 and overall life expectancy from 71 to 80 years,” says Paul. “The lifespan increase must match with health being in good shape for all our citizens. So a healthy lifestyle is the need of the hour.”
As longevity becomes one of the defining conversations of our time, perhaps this is the distinction that matters the most. Living longer is not enough. We need to live healthier for longer. And for India, that conversation must begin well before we become old.
Different Benchmarks
There is another complication: Indians may not age in the same way as western populations. Deepak Saini, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and convenor, Longevity India, says that much of what we know about ageing comes from studies conducted on western populations. We cannot simply assume that the same benchmarks apply to Indians. That is the thinking behind IISc’s BHARAT study, “Biomarkers of Healthy Aging, Resilience, Adversity and Transitions”, which is studying ageing specifically in Indians through clinical information, lifestyle and dietary patterns and multi-omics data.
One important difference is body composition. Indians tend to have lower muscle mass than many Western populations while simultaneously carrying a disproportionately high burden of diabetes and metabolic disease. Someone can therefore look relatively lean and still carry considerable metabolic risk.
Diet adds another layer. Indian diets can be carbohydrate-heavy and inadequate in protein, a problem that becomes increasingly important as maintaining muscle gets harder with age.
Ageing and the Indian Body
The real question, says Saini, is why the Indian body behaves differently. What role do our genetics, food, environment and lifestyles play in determining how we age?
Saini describes longevity through three broad influences: genome, environment and phenome. The genome is the genetic hand we are born with, the DNA and inherited predispositions that can influence how we age and our susceptibility to disease. The environment is everything around us that acts upon that biology, from the air we breathe, pollution and climate to where and how we live. Even something seemingly distant, such as melting glaciers and climate change, can ultimately affect human health.
Through our behaviour and lifestyle we can influence part of our phenome, and potentially play a role in how we age.
The phenome is what emerges from the interaction between our genes and our lived lives: our diet, exercise, sleep, stress, habits, exposures and other factors that shape how our biology actually expresses itself over time. And this is where Saini sees some room for individual action. We cannot change the genome we inherit, and we cannot control the entire environment around us. But through our behaviour and lifestyle, we can influence at least part of our phenome, and therefore potentially influence how we age.
This is where Saini sees some room for individual action. We cannot change the genome we inherit and we cannot control the entire environment around us. But through our behaviour and lifestyle, we can influence at least part of our phenome, and therefore potentially influence how we age.
What can we actually do? “Exercise, sleep better, take care of your nutrition,” Saini says.
It sounds almost disappointingly simple in a world increasingly fascinated by longevity clinics, infusions, supplements and biological-age tests.
You Can’t Buy Longevity
Prasun Chatterjee, clinical lead for geriatric medicine and longevity at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital and a former All India Institute of Medical Sciences professor, is even more emphatic about the absence of shortcuts and quick hacks for anti-ageing. Many of the habits now being rediscovered by longevity science, he points out, are hardly revolutionary: sleep seven hours, eat properly, exercise, practise yoga, finish dinner early and cultivate gratitude and happiness. Above all, live according to the body’s circadian rhythm. There is, he jokes, no “owl or fowl syndrome”. We should rise with the sun and sleep early.
“It’s mostly about reclaiming our roots and ancient wisdom. We are now explaining how a centenarian reached 100 through science,” Chatterjee says. In other words, science is increasingly finding explanations for what previous generations arrived at through lived experience.
That is definitely worth remembering at a time when longevity is increasingly being marketed as something we can buy: another supplement, infusion, test or intervention.
Chatterjee is particularly sceptical of expensive treatments that run ahead of robust scientific evidence. As for supplements promoted as longevity solutions, he says that he would not use them without adequate evidence from randomised trials. “No magic pill can improve your muscle mass other than exercise,” he says.
This may be the less glamorous truth about longevity. The science will advance with time, and new diagnostics, drugs and technologies may genuinely change how we age. But innovation cannot substitute for the basics.
India has already achieved the first longevity revolution: we are living much longer than previous generations. The next one will be more meaningful, not simply adding years to life, but adding health, strength, happiness and independence to those years. Or, as Paul puts it, making lifespan finally match healthspan.
(Views expressed are personal)
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Namrata Kohli is a freelance journalist and author
