Homeless and cold: No way to die

On Tuesday, as the nation went to sleep even as temperatures in North India dropped to new levels, a 50-year-old homeless man, who used to earn a living by working as a painter, died allegedly due to extreme cold in Indore. Ramakant’s body was found outside the house of a local resident with the police saying that since there were no injuries, the man who slept under the open sky on Tuesday night, might have died of the severe cold.

For most of the homeless in India who number approximately 20 lakh of whom 50 percent live in urban areas, bonfires are the only way to fight the biting chill when temperatures drop to 5 degrees Celsius and even lower. There are night shelters of course but the facilities are sparse and even the homeless do not venture to stay in them. Which is why scores of them succumb to the cold every winter. And who are these people who do not even have a rudimentary facility like a roof over their heads?

They are daily labourers, rag pickers and the poorest of the poor who migrate from urban areas to cities in search of employment. They find shelter under flyovers, in pipes, places of worship and railway platforms where they are always at the mercy of the guards. The children are inevitably there and bear the brunt of the merciless weather. In a nation where reports say almost nine crore people etch out a living below the poverty line, affordable housing is a big issue particularly in big cities.

So most of the homeless make do with sheds made of scraps of tin, cardboard and wood while others find comfort in the slums which dot every city and town. There are government schemes of course, which have been conceived with the express intention of providing affordable shelters which include the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).

However reports say only a miniscule proportion of the housing projects conceived under this scheme have seen the light of the day. As for another ambitious housing scheme of the Central government, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), its purpose of providing affordable housing to every citizen by 2022 remains a hollow dream.

In Bengaluru, the scene is not too different with the homeless confined to shacks which hardly provide them any shelter from the pouring rain during the monsoon or the cold. Reports say there are about 50 night shelters across the city which can accommodate around 1,500 people, but is this really enough for a city with a population of about 1.3 crore is a debatable point.

So it is not surprising if one sees people wrapped in blankets sleeping before shops and at bus stops in the night with nowhere else to go in a city which ironically churns out lakhs of crores worth IT products every year for exports. Expecting the government to come to the support of these hapless people may prove to be a never-ending wait and so it is only the community which can help by educating the local population about the problems of the homeless.

Identifying the homeless in each locality, finding the root cause of their plight and ensuring that a plan is drawn up to make them find jobs, stand on their own feet and one day have a home of their own, could be a cause worth taking up for every service-minded citizen. And if we in Bengaluru can make a beginning, why not others?