In India’s capital, Delhi, winter’s plunging temperatures and
the polluted smog turn sleeping into a formidable daily challenge for the most
dispossessed of city residents—people without homes. The state government has
established 218 homeless shelters in Delhi with a capacity of over 17,000
persons. However, half the capacity of the shelters lies unused even on the
coldest nights. There are around 125,000 homeless persons in Delhi by the
government’s own estimates, yet only 8,500 are sleeping under the roofs of
their shelters. For every homeless person who sleeps in a shelter in the city,
there are an estimated 15 who still sleep out in the open. Delhi’s local
government has launched what it describes as a massive “rescue” mission. Every
winter night, officials, and policemen with long thick sticks, as well as NGO
workers scour the streets for homeless people. On locating them, they forcefully
push them into the nearest homeless shelter. Also, the state government has launched
an app, through which any citizen who spots a homeless person sleeping in the
open is invited to take a picture of the person with the details of his or her
location. And it is promised that officials would expeditiously “rescue” that
person by coercing him or her into the shelters.
It does not occur to these officials to actually ask
homeless persons why indeed they refuse to sleep in the shelters that the
government has opened for them. If they did, they would learn that the shelters
are so unsanitary that if they sleep in these, they contract fleas that make
sleep impossible anyway, and even the days unbearable. They worry about sleeping
beside strangers, bodies packed against bodies, because someone may steal the
few belongings that they own. Some like rag-pickers, street vendors, and
rickshaw pullers need spaces where they can safely store their bags for
ragpicking, their small stocks of materials like cigarettes or artefacts that
they sell, or their rickshaws, but shelters typically do not allow these. And
finally they spoke about disrespectful behaviour by shelter managing staff, who
are often untrained, very poorly paid, and poorly motivated. At present,
shelters are no more than spaces where living bodies of the very poor have to
be stuffed every night—the more of them fit in as little space as possible the
better it is—and summarily ejected every morning. They closely resemble
Victorian poorhouses: unsanitary, undignified and disrespectful.
The places where they slept in the open for generations, now
cleansed by the “rescue” operations mounted by state officials and police, were
rough hard spaces. But they enjoyed the safety of numbers. Instead, now they
are forced to search for dark side alleys and parks that are enormously more
unsafe but where the benign eyes of rescue teams are unlikely to reach.
The largest majority of homeless persons are single working
men, trying to earn enough to send home to their villages to keep hunger away
from the door of their destitute families. Or these are women and children
escaping monstrous violence in their homes. What they need is not poor houses,
but affordable working men and working women hostels, in which beds and lockers
are available at modest rents; places of safety for women survivors of domestic
violence; and for homeless children, hundreds of egalitarian welcoming
residential schools, with after-care and continuing education even when they
grow into young adults. For those with grave ailments like TB or injuries, the life-saving
need is for recovery shelters where they can rest and recuperate in the absence
of homes and families because otherwise they would just die on the streets,
winter, summer or rains.
Of course, all of this would require large public
investments. Even more than that, it would require respect and empathy. This
would entail a consensus that poor people actually matter.
World Socialism Party
(India)
Email:
wspindia@hotmail.com
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