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10,000 women shiver every night in Delhi
An estimated 150,000 people are homeless in the national capital, nearly 10,000 destitute women have not even one designated shelter, and with a harsh winter forecast, matters are only going to get worse.
In a city that prides itself on its inspirational ‘world-class’ status, it is a glaring failure of the state that so many people continue to be forced to live on the streets without any available recourse.
Even more horrifying is the fact that there is not even one shelter for the city’s over 10,000 homeless women.
Though the city tends to blame the homeless for their own plight and washes its hands of all legal and moral responsibility to protect and provide for them, it fails to address the structural and systemic factors that lead to homelessness.
The most critical of these are the non-existence of low cost and public housing, large-scale eviction drives and slum demolitions without adequate livelihood-based rehabilitation and resettlement, and shift in land-use towards intensive infrastructure development such as highways and shopping malls.
The government’s current focus is on rapid urban renewal and city beautification at the cost of the poor.
Activists point out that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi runs only 10 permanent shelters for the homeless catering to around 2500 people, leaving over 98 percent of the city’s homeless to fend for themselves or be provided for by NGOs such as AAA which runs seven shelters.
In contrast, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation - supposedly India’s richest civic body - runs not a single shelter. The only shelter for homeless women in Delhi’s Yamuna Pushta, which was being run on a contractual basis by AAA for the MCD, was closed in June this year on grounds that the space was needed to store material for building a city centre nearby.
The issue is not of paucity of funds or absence of space but of a complete lack of priority and concern.
When the government can manage to raise money in the magnitude of billions for the first phase of the Delhi Metro, high capacity bus corridor, and for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, including the provision of free land for stadiums and other construction, why can’t it allocate funds and find space for public housing and shelters for the homeless?
The fact that there is no government data on homeless people in Delhi also reflects the government’s appalling negligence towards the issue. Existing estimates of the number of Delhi’s homeless are from the civil society.
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