Homeless in Delhi

Brrrracing yourself for the freezing festive season? Got your woollies and your gifts in place? And the food and wine? This is one of the coldest winters in a long time, so better enjoy the little sun you get. Sure, picnics are a great idea too. Ah yes — the fog. Really messes up your life, doesn’t it? Especially in North India. Planes refusing to take off, trains perpetually late, clothes damp and clammy, room heaters and geysers giving electricity bills a horror flick look. Not easy to be bright and cheerful in this wondrous season of giving, is it?

Allow me to dampen your spirits further. Officially, 106 people have died of cold this month. Since official figures are always politely understated, let’s just say scores are dying of cold around North India every day. Most freeze to death under the open sky in busy cities, or in tattered shacks, or under trees or in crumbling huts. If you think you have a problem with the winter chill, think again.
The good news is that there are people who are trying to do something about it. The courts have instructed state governments to protect these vulnerable citizens. “You should not allow even a single person to die this winter from the freezing cold,” said the Supreme Court this month as it ordered Delhi and other states to provide adequate night shelters for the homeless. And the Delhi high court, which ordered that all night shelters in Delhi be made operational, is closely monitoring the government’s progress.
Not that there aren’t shelters in fine cities like Delhi, it’s just that they are either closed, or dysfunctional or so miserable that the homeless prefer to take their chances with death on the streets. Besides, the sarkar works in mysterious ways. Like when it demolished a shelter under construction last week, on the coldest day of the season when the temperature was
4.7° Celsius. Or when it closed down 21 of the 64 permanent shelters, apparently because of low occupancy. “Has the number of homeless people decreased in Delhi?” asked the Supreme Court. “It is difficult to believe.”
Especially since the number of the homeless has grown dramatically. Delhi, holding out dreams of a new, affluent India, has had an increasing flow of migrants, mostly from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Amazingly, as the number of homeless grew, the number of shelters shrank. Through the years, the homeless have been evicted from sheltering spaces to beautify the capital. In the last couple of years, shelters were demolished and people left on the streets as the city decked up to host the Commonwealth Games.
Even if all the existing shelters were made liveable, there would still be a huge shortfall in accommodating the homeless in Delhi alone. We don’t really know how many are homeless in Delhi — anything between the official 56,000 and the unofficial 3,24,000. What we do know is that thousands are out there braving the winter chill, hoping to eke out a living, working as daily labourers, rickshaw-pullers, small vendors. People forced by poverty to leave their village hoping to give their families a better future, desperate people who send back home whatever they can muster, who live in everyday misery and die in the streets, friendless, hundreds of miles from home.
Under court supervision, hopefully shelters will come up and function, and many lives will be saved. But the homeless need more than a temporary roof over their heads in the peak of winter — the only time the government takes note of them. They need basic amenities through the year — water, sanitation, healthcare, affordable food, the freedom to cook, some protection from violence.
Once homeless, life only gets harder. Almost all of their paltry earnings go in paying for basics — food, water and the use of a toilet. A recent study found that the homeless in Mumbai pay about 300 per cent more for water than people in homes, and up to a third of their daily income is spent on bathing and using the toilet. Homeless people are especially vulnerable to disease, yet can neither access nor pay for healthcare.
Life on the streets is worse for women — who have fewer shelters to go to, are harassed and often raped, and are also poorer with less access to work if they have children to look after. Besides, the police often flaunt curious rules and confiscate the few pots and pans they have if they try to cook during the day. Women seek survival by huddling together or with their families, in railways stations or religious premises.
Girls living on the streets are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and violence. Homeless kids are robbed of their childhood. They work as ragpickers or menial labour, live in filth, often go hungry, have no healthcare, and of course no education. This week we learnt that 80 per cent of Delhi’s 50,000 homeless kids sniff diluter fluid or boot polish, smoke beedis or use cough syrups to fight the cold. These abandoned kids and orphans, children of migrant labour or kids who had run away to escape violence, thus have an added burden of addiction.
To successfully deal with homelessness, we need a more sustained and holistic approach. Setting up night shelters is an essential step — but just the first step. We need 24 hour shelters open through the year. And we must devise ways of plugging in the homeless — who as labour or rickshawpullers or vendors help build our cities and keep it running — into the system so that they can get the benefits due to every citizen. They need access to hospitals and government schemes. They need to be protected and not tormented by the police. They need to be protected from the goons and the Beggars Act that make criminals out of the helpless.
And to enure that they can indeed improve their lot and get out of this vicious cycle of suffering, street kids need to be given access to education. And the adults must have access to easy loans to build a life and climb out of their misery.
The Delhi government is planning to set up a panel to examine the needs of shelters for the homeless. Hopefully they will keep in mind the larger picture, and treat the homeless with some dignity, as partners in the process of development.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com