Neha Sinha, Dementia Specialist and Clinical Psychologist, Co-founder & CEO, Epoch Elder Care shares her expertise on elder care.
With the growing ageing population in the country, the elder care ecosystem in India requires a greater focus. Neha Sinha, Dementia Specialist and Clinical Psychologist, Co-founder & CEO, Epoch Elder Care, shares her expertise in a conversation with IndiaMedToday.
1. To begin, could you briefly describe your role as CEO and Co-founder of Epoch Elder Care, and the core mission that drives your work in dementia and elder care today?
As CEO & Co-founder of Epoch Elder Care, I oversee both care and operations, but what truly anchors everything is creating an elder care ecosystem in India grounded in holistic, person-centred care. Holistic care means considering every elder’s physical, social, emotional, and mental well-being in equal measure, because no dimension of health exists in isolation.
Person-centred care means understanding the individual, their routines, their preferences, their personality, and the nuances that most systems overlook. We build care plans around those realities.
2. Which specific problem in India’s dementia and senior care ecosystem are you most focused on solving, and why does it matter now?
There are three interconnected gaps that the entire elder care ecosystem needs to adapt around in India. The first is specialization and awareness: the recognition that elder care, and specifically dementia care, is a distinct discipline requiring trained professionals, structured protocols, and dedicated resources. That understanding is still nascent in India. The second is mindset. We are a culture that responds to crisis. Families seek help when the situation has become completely unmanageable, when the caregiver is burnt out, and the window for meaningful intervention has already closed. The third is early intervention. Early diagnosis and early support do not just improve outcomes for the elder; they change the entire trajectory of the condition and the family’s experience of it.
The reason this matters now is straightforward: India’s demographic reality will not wait. The population of older adults is growing at a pace our systems are wholly unprepared for, and dementia alone is projected to affect millions, most of whom will be managed, or mismanaged, at home, without the right knowledge or support. We cannot keep building elder care in India as a reaction. The shift from firefighting to foresight, from crisis response to proactive, person-centred care, that is the shift we strive to drive. The time to build that system is not when the need becomes undeniable. It already is.
3. Can you share one initiative, programme or care model from Epoch Elder Care that you believe has made the most meaningful impact on elders, families or the caregiving system?
At Epoch, before we talk about care plans, we talk about the person. We ask families to tell us everything: what their loved one did for decades, what brought them joy, what their mornings looked like, what music moved them, whether they had a green thumb or a love for cooking or a habit of reading the newspaper cover to cover, because that’s where care begins, not with a diagnosis, but with a life.
We then build everything- their daily rhythm, their environment, their engagement activities- around who they actually are. Someone who spent 30 years teaching will find purpose differently than someone who spent those years gardening or running a business. We don’t fit people into a programme. We build the programme around them. For us, every dimension of a person’s well-being, physical, emotional, social, and mental, holds equal weight. And every elder in our care is seen not as a condition to be managed, but as a life to be celebrated.
4. What is one innovation or strategic decision in dementia care or person-centric support that significantly changed the trajectory of Epoch Elder Care in the last 2–3 years?
One of the most significant strategic decisions we made in recent years was launching our dementia daycare programme, and its impact has exceeded what we initially anticipated. Daycare was conceived as a bridge. Families in India carry enormous guilt and anxiety around the idea of elder care, and that emotional weight often delays the decision to seek help until it is too late. Daycare lowers that barrier. It gives families a space to witness, firsthand, what structured, professional care actually looks and feels like, without the finality that residential care can sometimes feel like. For elders, it offers something equally valuable: a transitional phase, a routine, and a similar community to connect with, often for the first time in years.
What has moved us most, however, are the stories. Since its inception, the daycare programme has given us some of our most meaningful success stories: elders who arrived withdrawn and disengaged, and found themselves again through connection, stimulation, and care that saw them fully. It changed how families think about elder care. And in doing so, it quietly began changing the conversation around it.
5. From a business and operational perspective, what do you see as the biggest challenge in scaling quality dementia and senior care in India today, and how is Epoch addressing it?
The biggest challenge in scaling quality elder care in India is building a system that actually works for India. This is not a country with a single cultural reality. Language, family structure, dietary habits, religious practices, and regional sensibilities- the diversity across our population is vast, and elder care is deeply personal. A model that works in urban Mumbai will not translate wholesale to a family in rural Tamil Nadu or a household in Kolkata. The nuances are enormous, and they matter.
There is also a stark shortage of trained dementia specialists and skilled caregivers in India. Dementia care is not general nursing; it requires specific clinical knowledge, behavioural understanding, and enormous emotional resilience. As demand grows with an ageing population, the pipeline of trained professionals is nowhere near where it needs to be. This gap sits at the heart of the quality problem. At Epoch, we are constantly learning, iterating, and resisting the urge to standardize what should never be standardized. Person-centred care, by definition, cannot be one-size-fits-all. Building a model that holds both quality and cultural sensitivity at scale is the real work. And we are committed to doing it thoughtfully.
6. Collaboration is critical in elder care. Who do you see as your most important partners (hospitals, mental health professionals, caregivers, government, ASLI members), and how do these partnerships create value for seniors and families?
Every partner in our network is a cog in the same system. Hospitals provide clinical oversight and referral pathways. Mental health professionals address the emotional and psychological dimensions of ageing that medical care alone cannot. Trained caregivers are the human face of everything we believe in. Government shapes the policy environment that either enables or limits progress. And networks like ASLI create the collective voice and cross-organisational learning that no single institution can generate alone. No single partner can build the elder care ecosystem India needs. But together, each cog turning in the right direction, the system begins to move. That is the only way this works.
7. Looking ahead to the next 3- 5 years, what one trend in dementia care, assisted living or ageing health do you think senior care leaders and policymakers cannot afford to ignore?
India is home to over 8.8 million people living with dementia today, a number projected to nearly double by 2036. The ageing population is growing faster than our systems, our awareness, and our workforce can keep pace with. Three realities are converging at once:
- The numbers are accelerating. Dementia cases will multiply significantly, yet fewer than 1 in 10 people in India currently receive a formal diagnosis. Most families are navigating this entirely alone.
- The caregiving safety net is eroding. Nuclear families have replaced the joint family systems that historically absorbed caregiving. Adult children are increasingly mobile, professionally committed, and geographically distant from ageing parents.
- The workforce is nowhere near ready. India faces a critical shortage of trained dementia specialists and skilled caregivers. As demand surges, this gap will only deepen without deliberate investment in the sector.
The window to act, to train professionals, shape policy, and build infrastructure, is open right now. In five years, we will either have used it wisely or we will be firefighting at a scale we are entirely unprepared for. We are actively expanding our care homes and operational services across India, because the time to build is now.
8. What is one lesson or piece of advice you would offer to emerging elder care entrepreneurs and dementia care professionals who want to build sustainable, impact-driven organisations in India?
The one thing I would say is this: do not let systems make you forget people. Systems are necessary, but they are a means, not the mission. The mission is the individual sitting in front of you. A complete person, with a history, a personality, fears they may not have words for, and a life that deserves to be fully seen.
Sit with your elders. Talk to them. Listen to their families. Understand what keeps them up at night. The nuances you gather in those conversations will teach you more than any framework or business model ever will. In elder care, depth of connection is not a soft skill; it is your greatest strategic asset. The organizations that grow meaningfully in this space will be the ones that never lose sight of that.
