A country that is vying for the tag of a superpower ranks 127 on the Human Development Index (UNHDR 2003);

280million of its 1.1 billion population lives below the poverty line. Yet another 450million lives on less than a dollar a day. 285 million live in urban settlements. Of these, at least a 100 million live in sub-human conditions. Most of the latter are people who came to the cities in search of a better life disheartened by the bleak reality of their oppressed existence in the villages. More than one-fourth of Indias population (28%) inhabiting nearly 5161 urban centers,(2001) already being in the cities, by 2021, 40% of the population is projected to be in the urban centers. The outcry for Good Urban Governance with policy emphasis on productivity, environment, community health, education, quality of life, equity and poverty alleviation is extremely well placed since nearly 2/3rd of the national income is generated in the cities. The contribution of the 93% (unorganized) work force being employed to create proportionate goods and services for Indias fast growing economy has to be looked upon in its holistic perspective. For those who are primarily responsible to run these engines of growth there is very little space and infrastructural facilities created in terms of shelters, working and living conditions befitting their dignified existence. Census 2001 has brought out a figure of 13 million houseless households, each household accounting for 5[2]

6 members, the total population of such houseless (or shelterless) being at least 6.5 crores in the country.
The Census in 2001 enumerated 1.94 million homeless people in India, of whom 1.16 million lived in villages, and only 0.77 million lived in cities and towns.

The number of such population in Mumbai has gone up to more than 1lakh. A joint study was carried out by Alternative Realities, ActionAid, & Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 6 zones and 24 wards of Mumbai (2004). Zone 1 outlines A, B, C, D and E wards which appears to be the largest conglomeration of the homeless citizens in Mumbai. The second largest population of homeless citizens becomes visible in Zone 2 followed by Zone 4, Zone 3, Zone 6 and Zone 5 consecutively. Data suggest that the constitution of homeless consist single male, single female, children and families living without any access to shelter.

As is evident from the survey, more than 75% of the homeless population is concentrated in the age group of 16 to 45 years. It further suggests that these people are working at all low end jobs (Putting up banners, Catering business, Loading-unloading, etc) and contribute productively to the Mumbais economy. These hard working homeless citizens are the backbone of the city economy and cannot be categorized as beggars.
The world is experiencing a global housing crisis.

About 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing and 100 million are homeless.(1) Each week, more than 1 million people are born in, or move to, cities in the developing world.(2) One billion people (32 percent of the global urban population) live in urban slums. If no serious action were taken, the number of slum dwellers worldwide would increase over the next 30 years to nearly 2 billion.(3)

In 2005 it was estimated that about 100 million people were homeless worldwide. A census conducted in 2001 indicates that there are 1.94 million homeless people living in India. 3/5 of them live in villages and 2/5 in cities and towns. This figure, however, appears to be an underestimation. 20-40 million alone were from urban areas.
There were 20,000 pavement dwellers as early as 1952; the number grew to 62,000 by 1961, whereas the 1981 Census identified about 22,600 households. SPARC (Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centre) an NGO and Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, counted 125,000 pavement dwellers in 1985. If Census 2001 figures are anything to go by, India has about two million homeless people

1.75 lakh homeless people in Mumbai

Roughly one percent of the urban population in India is believed to be homeless, amounting to an estimated 3 million people. The official Census of India (2001), however, tells a different story: the figures report only 778,599 homeless, a gross underestimate.

data for homelessness in developing countries is extremely sparse and scattered. The most comprehensive is probably in India where the 1981 Homeless Census estimated that there were 2,342,000 homeless people. The 1991 Census of India showed a much lower figure of 1.2 million people. Yet, there are some 250,000 pavement dwellers in Mumbai alone; Government apathy In 2010, the Supreme Court directed each state in the country to provide at least one shelter for the homeless per one lakh population. "Each state was asked to file a response and commit to building more night shelters, by March 31, 2011," says Indu Prakash Singh, Technical Advisor of the Indo-Global Social Service Society, who initiated the plea for shelter for the homeless in the Supreme Court. The Maharashtra government, however, didn't commit to creating shelters. As a result, the population of nearly 1.8 lakh homeless people in Mumbai falls prey to a number of diseases. According to Bharadwaj, 45 per cent of the total homeless population falls prey to diseases caused by mosquitoes, while 32 per cent get malaria. Every year, the monsoon and lack of quality health care kills 160-170 homeless people; 65 per cent of the homeless children suffer from severe stomach infections, dysentery, viral fever, skin blisters and other diseases. The homeless are further troubled by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) authorities. "They come every morning and we have to dismantle our houses and run to railway tracks. At times, they confiscate our belongings or use blades to cut the plastic sheets with which we make our houses," says Chandu, 40, who stays with his family on a pavement in Mahim. "Despite a Supreme Court directive, Maharashtra has not done anything for the homeless. Unlike in Chennai, Delhi and other cities, Mumbai does not have a single shelter for the homeless," Bharadwaj points out. In its affidavit, the Maharashtra government acknowledged that the homeless are the poorest of the poor and cannot afford informal housing, but it put slum dwellers and beggars in the same category as the homeless. The government then cited schemes for the benefit of slum dwellers as those also meant for the homeless. "The homeless are very different from slum dwellers. The slum rehabilitation schemes and beggars' homes that the (Maharashtra) government is harping about are not schemes for the homeless," says Singh. All other states made a commitment to build shelters for homeless people, except Maharashtra, points out Sandeep Chachra, advisor to the Supreme Court on homelessness. The court has extended the deadline for Maharashtra government to respond on the issue till October 31. Civil society members strongly believe that the state is increasingly resorting to anti-poor policies. "The biggest hurdle in the country's development is the bureaucracy. The deadline has now been extended but if in the next hearing the government does not give any commitment, we will press for contempt of court charges," adds Singh. "The government should stop looking at providing houses as charity. The homeless have a right to housing. It is the responsibility of the state to provide safe and secure houses where the homeless can come back at night after work," he adds. While the government is buying time, the activists and the homeless are slowly running out of patience. Chachra and Nirja Bhatnagar, Maharashtra Region Manager of Action Aid sent a letter to Principal Secretary of Maharashtra, Ratnakar Gaikwad, requesting for an appointment to discuss the issue on June 5, but did not get any response. The final battle between the activists and the state of Maharashtra is set for October 31, which leaves the city's homeless alone in their fight against the monsoons. "The homeless have been

deprived of shelter because they don't have ration cards. But why do they have to beg for a ration card to prove that they belong to this country," wonders Bhatnagar. 2.1 crore Population of Mumbai 210 Number of night shelters the city should have as per the SC directive The ratio of female:male homeless children is 1:10. 25 new homeless children arrive in Mumbai station each day on the trains from the rest of India. The 10 million street children of India is 10% of the world's total As per census 2001, 285 million Indians live in nearly 4378 towns and cities spread across the length and breadth of the country. This comprises 27.8 percent of population, in sharp contrast to only 60 million (15 percent) who lived in urban areas in 1947 when the country became Independent.

t. During the last fifty years,the population of India has grown two and half times, but urban India has grown by nearly five times .Since 1941, Delhi has grown 427 percent, Bombay 227 percent,. However, the benefits of this urban growth is not shared by every one living in urban areas. In the large cities around 15 percent of the male workforce and 25 percent of the female workforce have no regular employment. Such persons are considered a burden from the economic point of view and are vulnerable from the health point of view. The link between urbanisation, a degraded environment, inaccessibility to health care and deteriorating quality of life, is particularly significant. Large-scale unplanned rural-urban migration and the continuous growth of towns and cities have resulted in overloaded public services ,scarcity of housing and inaccessible health care facilities.
As per the India: Urban Poverty Report 2009, the total urban homeless population in India is 7,78,599 people (Census 2001 figures). Their condition is clearly linked to their lack of adequate shelter. Though governments in few cities have made efforts to provide temporary shelters, the people having access to these are far from adequate. For example, in Delhi less than 3% of the homeless people have access to night shelters.

Up to 100 million people are homeless throughout the world, the majority of them women and dependent children. The problem is not just homelessness. Overall, at least 600 million people again, most of them women and dependent children live in shelters that are life threatening or health threatening in developing world cities.

Every day, some 50,000 people, mostly women and children, die as a result of poor shelter, polluted water and inadequate sanitation. Some 70 million women and children live in homes where smoke from cooking fires damages their health. Of the estimated 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70 percent are women and girls. Women and girls are also the fastest increasing group of impoverished, a process called the global feminization of poverty. India is one of the few developing countries that has tried to count its homeless, finding more than 2.3 million.

Statistics reveal that one of every six persons in the world is homeless. India has one of the largest homeless populations in the world. In fact, it is estimated that by 2015, Mumbai will be the largest homeless city in the world with a homeless population of 27.4 million people.
According to a Right to Information reply received from Delhi Police, 6,861 homeless deaths were reported from 2007 to 2011 across five districts, activists said on Wednesday. Out of the total number there were 4,748 males, 277 females and 105 childrens deaths in Delhi. In addition, 1,731 of these deaths were unclassified. This is an extremely alarming number, especially as it is likely to be even higher as Delhi has 11 districts, said S A Azad, from Campaign for Rehabilitation of Homeless People. The lack of government attention to these deaths, year after year, reflect s a glaring insensitivity of the state to the homeless, Azad said.

The census data says that out of 40,000 homeless people in Mumbai, 12,000 are living in the lanes of Colaba, Cuffe Parade and Kalbadevi. Most of them were found living in the south Mumbai areas such as Colaba, Cuffe Parade, Fort, P D Mello Road, Ballard Estate, Churchgate, Abdul Rehman Street, Lokmanya Tilak Marg, Chandanwadi, Kalbadevi and Netaji Subhash Road. Areas other than south Mumbai having large number of homeless people are Dadar, Mahim, Dharavi, Bandra, Jogeshwari and Malad. Most people living in the streets are labourers working at construction sites. With total lack of access to basic amenities, these people are always at the risk of contracting diseases. in 2006, when his NGO conducted a survey in association with Tata Institute of Social Sciences and ActionAid, the number of people without

homes was 35,000. Is it possible that the number of homeless is just 40,000 six years later? The figure should be almost a lakh.
According to NGO activists, there are approximately 1.75 lakh homeless people in Mumbai and 1.5 lakh in Delhi.

There are over 1 lakh homeless in Delhi and we have 184 shelters for them.

With property rates hitting the stratosphere, the affluent south Mumbai area has likely witnessed a decline in residential population, while the suburbs have had a rise, according to Census officials. "It has been observed that primarily due to rising property rates, the residential population in south Mumbai has gown down. Whereas the residential population in suburbs has seen an increase of about 10-15 per cent," Census officials said. The real estate market in Mumbai continues to remain stagnant as sale transactions are at an all-time low due to the high prices and rising interest rates. The homeless population has likely increased from the earlier 25,000 to 35,000-40,000, officials said, adding that such people were seen more in A, B and C wards. All the three wards fall in south Mumbai. "When we set out, we thought that areas such as Dadar, Mahim and Matunga would have the maximum homeless. But it turned out that 'A' ward (Crawford Market, Mohammed Ali Road and Fashion Street), along with 'B' and 'C' wards had the maximum homeless," said a senior health department official. "The suburbs had the least homeless. This is because there is still room in the suburbs to build homes, whereas in South Mumbai there's no space left," he added.
Mumbai is India's most populated city with over 1.84 crore people

The 2011 Census report also shows that India now has a child sex ratio of 914 female against 1,000 male the lowest since Independence

The National Report on Homelessness, compiled by the commissioners of the apex court after examining relevant data from 15 states, has found that three million people in India are living out in the open during these bitterly cold months. Of the 15 states, only Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh have shown average compliance building 30-60 per cent of the required night shelters. Ten states have provided 20-30 per cent of shelters to the poor, while two Maharashtra and ever-laggardly West Bengal have in willful disobedience of the court orders not even built 20 per cent of the targeted shelters. Incidentally, the court order directing the states to build

an adequate number of night shelters before the onset of winter had been passed in December 2010. In February and, later, in May the same year, major cities in each of Indias states and union territories with a population of more than 500,000 were instructed by the Supreme Court to build one night shelter per 100,000 of the total population.

The shocking non-compliance of not less than 15 states to the Supreme Courts directive concerning night shelters was possible because of the lack of a legal safety net for the countrys destitute population. Indias homeless people, a community estimated to be two million in the 2001 census, have a rather ambiguous identity in legal terms. Officially, the term, homeless, is used to describe people who do not live in a census house, a dwelling that is described as a structure with a roof. But such a loose definition leaves open considerable gaps that allow legitimate communities to be excluded from the governments welfare initiatives. For instance, the legal description does not include men, women and children who live in makeshift structures, or in the vastly inadequate shelter homes. Moreover, the relevant legislations be it the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (1959) or the Karnataka Prohibition of Beggary Act (1975) have been conceived as punitive measures, and fail to address the heterogeneous character of Indias homeless community. Like many other antiquated legislations that are used to exploit marginalized communities, Indias laws that criminalize begging go back to colonial jurisprudence. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 was passed in the United Kingdom to indict economic migrants, disbanded soldiers who had survived the Napoleonic wars as well as the homeless. This draconian legislation, in turn, was inspired by the insensitive English Poor Law system that manifested itself in the form of medieval statutes. As in modern societies, the legal apparatus during the reign of the Tudors, for example, aimed at imprisoning vagrants in a bid to render them invisible to the public eye. In 1495, for instance, a law was passed by Parliament that instructed officials to seize vagabonds, idle and suspected personsand set in stocks, there to remain by the space of three days and three nights to have none other sustenance but bread and water and then to be commanded to avoid the town. The Indian governments crackdown on Delhis homeless community during the Commonwea lth Games bore evidence of a similar institutional drive to deny the destitute access to public space. Indias laws are disinclined towards legal reform that can decriminalize begging. This is not only an indicator of the judicial systems colonial tempera ment but also its susceptibility to prevalent societal prejudices. Significantly, the invisibility of the homeless community can be directly attributed to the invisibility of its labour. The able-bodied among the homeless people in nearly every Indian city work as rickshaw-pullers, rag-pickers, shoe-shine boys, roadside performers, and even domestic help. The CES study found that 10.5 per cent of the women respondents worked as domestic help, 6.57 per cent were involved in the trade of organs, while in Patna, nearly 13 per cent of the homeless were professional blood donors. The idea of the homeless as economically unproductive is a convenient tool in the hands of Indias policymakers to question the communitys rightful entitlements to even the meagre provisions of the Right to Food (Guarantee of Safety and Security) Act. The States unwillingness to recognize the sundry economic services offered by the homeless can also be interpreted as a devious attempt to deny citizenship to a seemingly transient population. The absence of a proof of residence makes it impossible for the homeless to obtain documents such as ration cards, which not only entitle the bearer to basic provisions but also serve as an undeniable proof of citizenship. Expectedly, the census exercise has proven to be equally apathetic when it comes to enumerating the homeless. In 2011, only 1,200 census officials worked for a single night to count the homeless in Mumbai. Consequently only 30,000 people in a population estimated to be 1.75 lakh could be identified. It will not be possible to stem the forces that contribute to the rising incidence of homelessness. The prevailing agrarian crisis, embedded poverty, the uneven contours of development that have reduced villages and towns to being suppliers of a vast army of cheap, unorganized labour as well as recurrent natural calamities are some of the important causal factors of homelessness. What could be devised is an effective rehabilitation programme for the homeless community. Its success though would depend primarily on the sensitization of laws related to vagrancy. This process of sensitization has to be worked out on multiple levels. First, the ambiguities in the legal definition of homelessness need to be removed to neutralize the State attempts to exclude the needy. Second, the communitys rights and entitlements concerning education, healthcare and employment have to be recognized and safeguarded.

Legal clarity would assist the process of identification, as enumerators would have clear guidelines at their disposal when it comes to tackling complex questions related to inclusion. One of the challenges faced by modern strategies of enumeration is the fluid nature of the target group. However, a number of studies, including one by a French researcher on handcart-pullers in Old Delhi, have found that homeless communities often forge stable collectives, choosing to dwell, eat and sleep on demarcated territories to provide security to each other. It is imperative to introduce imaginative ways to enumerate the homeless. For instance, a careful scrutiny of caste, kinship and village affiliations could be useful as most migrants choose to initially settle with people who belong to similar caste/village groups. The drive to issue unique identification numbers to the homeless must receive wider institutional support for two reasons. It has the potential of being an effective instrument of enumeration. It can also be a useful means of identification that will entitle homeless people to government benefits. An effective model of enumeration would throw up reliable data, which can then be used to identify the diverse needs of the community. Primary among these is the construction of an adequate number of low-cost houses and night shelters. Apart from the inclusion of provisions such as electricity and water, these dwellings must also be designed by keeping in mind the localized needs of homeless populations. For instance, in Calcutta, a majority of the homeless people reside in family units. This requires night shelters to include separate arrangements for individual families. But, as research by the CES has indicated, in Madurai and Patna, where a large number of destitutes are single and old women as well as leprosy patients, a family-unit accommodation in night shelters would be quite pointless. Unfortunately, many of the night shelters in operation remain oblivious to the fact that the needs of the homeless community vary from one place to another. There are two intriguing, but difficult, questions that a policy on the homeless in India must ponder. Homelessness, augmented by economic hardship, is often a conscious choice. In Mumbai, one of Indias most expensive cities, residents rent out their dwellings (kholis) and live in shelters or on streets to earn money. Having failed to provide for them, does the State have the right to violate their democratic right to sustain themselves? Second, and perhaps more important, why cannot the poor bona fideresidents as well as migrants claim the city and its public space as their own? A body of art work (often described as haunting), exhibited by Lee Jeffries, an amateur photographer who has worked extensively on the homeless community in Europe as well as in the United States of America, perhaps provides the answers. Jeffriess photographs of men, women and children staring at the camera, their facial features strangely distorted by years of deprivation transform the subjects into ogre-like creatures. For the homeless, undoubtedly, are perceived the world over as spectres haunting cities that belong to others.

The situation of the 'homeless' in India is dire. Roughly one percent of the urban population in India is believed to be homeless, amounting to an estimated 3 million people. The official Census of India (2001), however, tells a different story: the figures report only 778,599 homeless, a gross underestimate. These street dwellers sleep under flyovers, in parks, and on pathways.

The Supreme Court of India, in addition to the right to food, issued adirective in February 2010 for a fundamental right to shelter. The ruling instructed each state government to provide one shelter (with a 100-person capacity) for every 100,000 of population. The response of the state governments has been nothing short of embarrassing. Mumbai, with a population of over 20 million people, should have at least 200 shelters, although only six units exist, according to the Homeless Collective, a forum of civil society organizations. The Delhi government, on the other hand, undertook hasty measures, leading to gross negligence and a waste of resources. To meet its targets last winter, it approved construction of over 60 temporary shelters and is estimated to have spent over INR 2.4 crore (US$500,000) without seeking a technical opinion on design. The shelters were made from tin materials that have zero insulation capacity, making them inhuman to sleep in. The homeless were left to sleep

indoors (occupancy below 30 percent in winter and almost zero in summer). The growing homeless situation and the 'one-size-fits-all' solutions that have been implemented thus far highlight the need for innovation in this area.
One in six people alive today lacks adequate shelter. As a result of poor shelter, polluted water and inadequate sanitation, 50,000 people mostly women and children die each day. The problem is disproportionately concentrated in the developing world. In India alone, there are more than 2.3 million homeless and that figure doesnt include the 170 million slum dwellers. But homeless does not have to mean hopeless.

Over 100 million persons are homeless worldwide and over 1.2 billion inadequately housed. As a result of poor shelter, polluted water and inadequate sanitation, 50,000 people mostly women and children die each day.
Homeless people can expect to die 30 years before the average person, research has found. A study showed that homeless men are dying at an average of 47 years and homeless women at 43, in stark contrast to the average age of death for the general population, 77 years. Suicide is also nine times more likely among people living rough than the general population. Meanwhile it found that deaths as a result of traffic accidents are three times as likely, infections twice as likely and falls are more than three times as likely to result in death. The study, Homelessness: A silent killer, showed that as expected, the causes of death for homeless people differ from those of the wider population, where disease is the biggest killer.

Millions die each year from diseases, untreated medical conditions, lack of nutrition, starvation, and freezing to death
: a homeless person of any medical background is roughly four times more likely to die than a housed person of the same age.

. The condition of homeless women can only be called pathetic. They have been neglected to an alarming extent. Just imagine how they survive on the streets with small children. Our estimate is that at least 10 percent of the homeless are women. We need well-equipped shelters for them where they can stay with their children. A survey of the homeless in Mumbai carried out by the Bombay Urban Industrial League for Development (BUILD) starkly exposed the injustices the homeless face. The citizens of Mumbai are supplied drinking water at Rs 3.50 per 1000 litres. But homeless people, who also happen to be the poorest, have no choice but to buy water at Rs 1000 for 1000 litres. They also have to pay on an average Rs 3 every time they use a toilet. Most of Mumbais homeless cant access hospitals. More than half of them have no identity documents. Fifty percent of homeless families in Mumbai have been living on the streets for near 20 years.

Consider the statistics in Mumbai alone: of the approximately 90,000 deaths registered every year, around 2,500 are of unknown persons. These are mainly beggars, drug addicts and mentally unstable people like Laxman. Not too many care for these despairing people who are dying alone every day in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Thane regions. In fact, often even the police dont touch a sick homeless person till s/he is actually dead,
According to a Right to Information reply received from Delhi Police, 6,861 homeless deaths were reported from 2007 to 2011 across five districts, activists said on Wednesday. Out of the total number there were 4,748 males, 277 females and 105 childrens deaths in Delhi. In addition, 1,731 of these deaths were unclassified. This is an extremely alarming number, especially as it is likely to be even higher as Delhi has 11 districts, said S A Azad, from Campaign for Rehabilitation of Homeless People. The lack of government attention to these deaths, year after year, reflects a glaring insensitivity of the state to the homeless, Azad said.

At least 10 homeless people are dying on the streets of Delhi every day, the rate peaking as the summer rolls on After examining the records for the first four months at Delhi's largest electric crematorium, Sarai Kale Khan, and the main Muslim burial grounds run by the Wakf Board, Jacob and Sharif found they averaged 306 bodies a month, or 10 daily. "Using this premise, one may conclude that from May 2009 to April 2010 92 per cent, i.e. 3,381 deaths could be directly or indirectly caused by starvation," said the report. Even in relative terms, the number of homeless dying in Delhi is significant. India's average death rate, in 2010, is 7.6 per 1,000 people per year. Delhi's 16 million population means 333 people die here every day. The numbers thrown up by the study indicate 3 per cent of this number is made up of homeless working men in their 40s who die from hunger and disease
With the advent of rains, social workers are worried that there will be a 30% rise in deaths of poor homeless people. Many of them are lost and aimless as they are mentally unstable.