A presentation outlining the plight of the most deprived of our citizens.

2. Who are the urban homeless?
 Described variously as homeless, houseless, roofless, shelter less
people, and pavement dwellers
 Census of India: ‘houseless population’ as the persons who are not
living in ‘census houses’, or a ‘structure with roof’
 Possible places where the houseless population may sleep include:
 pavements
 in hume pipes
 under bridges
 under staircases
 courtyards of shrines
 parks
 homeless shelters

3. Count the Children and the Dogs

4. Mostly not recent migrants
Homelessness an enduring condition
Large majority working men supporting impoverished
families in villages
Women escaping patriarchy and violence
Children escaping intense abuse and hunger
 Abandoned women and the aged
Women who escape violence
Complete breakdown of family, community and state
social protection systems

5.  State denial and indifference
 Devalued citizenship rights
 Census in 2001 enumerated only 0.77 million urban houseless
persons
 Gross underestimates because highly invisible group to officials:
 Lack formal address, identity proof, ration cards and voters’
identity cards
 Try to avoid visibility by state officials
 Micro-surveys estimate at least 1 percent of the population of cities
 This places estimate of urban homeless persons in India to be at
least around 3 million

6. Battling the seasons, especially cold and monsoon rains
Invisible homeless deaths
Renting even blankets to sleep in the open
Perennial fear of physical violence and sexual abuse
Police harassment and violence

8. Low end, casual, unorganised, unprotected work
Main occupations:
rag-picking,
casual daily work
street vending
construction work
casual sex work
begging (small numbers)
blood donation

9. Little and troubled access to even the most elementary
public services
Everything that they can use has to be paid for:
every visit to the toilet
every bath
water, both for drinking and for general use
blanket
‘I am afraid that even the mirror may not reflect your image if you
happened to stand before it without any money!’ - Subbiah, an aged
homeless man in Madurai

10. Food quantities may – but are not always –
sufficient
Quality monotonous, very elementary, often of poor
nutritional value, and unhygienic
Sources: street vendors, foraging, alms from
religious places
Rarely get home cooked food
Yet they spend the greatest part of their earnings in
the daily struggle to feed themselves and their
dependents.

11. Loneliness and social isolation dominant motifs of street life
 Around half homeless respondents in our study said they
never celebrated festivals
 71 per cent said they had no friends whom they could trust
and
 62 per cent felt that they belonged to no community, even of
the homeless.
 62 out of 85 homeless respondents felt they had never been
helped by anyone during their lives on the streets
 Many find solace in their loneliness in drugs or intoxication
Therefore even working homeless populations suffer
deep psycho-social problems as they spend years on
streets

12. HOW MANY OF YOU ARE FROM DELHI??
Extreme mutual acrimony and distrust
Homeless widely seen as people with no rights, their
livelihoods and shelter illegal, even criminal
Beggary and vagrancy laws criminalise destitution
Intense unrelenting police harassment brutality constantly
evicts homeless people
De facto debarment from public hospitals, schools, feeding
centres, pensions and ration cards, and social security
entitlements
Very few night shelters
Shelters with sub human facilities
Negligible government programs for food, housing and
social security of the homeless

13. Homeless people dying on Delhi’s streets in winter
2009
Letter to Supreme Court Judges
Prompt intervention creates right of homeless
persons to 24 hour dignified shelters
Delhi doubled shelters in 2 days
National effort under way
Major bottleneck: no National Program for Urban
Homeless

14. Delhi happens to be the only state in the “average”
category in the SC commissioners report. All other states
in poor
150 odd Shelters with a capacity of 50 each on average – do
the math??
Delhi has more than 2 Lakh homeless with 50K children…
Current capacities cover less than 5% of the need and the
gap keeps growing…
And Delhi is the best………..

15. Scheme very marginal in profile and importance.
Scheme not promoted as an “entitlement”
State and local governments required to take loans for what is
essentially a welfare effort
Demand driven program, depending on demand from local city
and state governments, which rarely came because of
invisibility, powerlessness and stigma that surrounds urban
homeless persons
Little knowledge or participation of civil society or homeless
persons themselves
Extremely marginal allocations, sometimes as low as 1 crore
rupees for the entire country! Overall 8 crores were used for 114
projects throughout the country with 17,000 beds in the period
of the scheme.