Chandni Chowk pedestrianisation, Covid force many homeless back to the streets
New Delhi: The Capital has seen a freezing winter this season, with the mercury dipping well below 5 degrees Celsius on multiple occasions and people on the streets turning to night shelters as their only cover from the biting cold.
At one such shelter in Chandni Chowk's Dangal Maidan, however, many people were left disappointed due to a lack of warm water, heaters, thick blankets and a severe lack of space.
"If I come in the afternoon, I get a bed as several day workers are out on their jobs but the days I come here in the evening, it is full so I sleep on the pavement across the shelter home," said Rajkumar, a day-time labourer.
He has no fixed job and takes up anything that is offered at event halls, cleaning or sweeping work in shops or restaurants. "So the day I get a job I don't get a bed," he said. The porta cabin at Dangal Maidan can accommodate 40 people.
Millennium Post found that two night-shelters in the Fountain Chowk area of Chandni Chowk have been shut down due to the ongoing pedestrianisation work of the heritage marketplace. Combined, these two shelters can house over 150 people who have now been advised to go to the shelter at the Fatehpuri rain basera, near the Delhi railway station, which has a capacity of 200 people or the one at Dangal Maidan.
According to the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), there are 319 night shelters with a capacity for 19,116 people — but this was pre-Covid-19. The capacity has now been revised to 8,766.
In 2019, Delhi had a requirement to house 11,000 people in night shelters, according to Sunil Aledia, director of the Centre for Holistic Development, an organisation that works for the rights of homeless persons.
The caretaker of the porta cabin at Dangal Maidan, Prabhakar Kumar, said that he had to turn away many seekers given the reduced capacity. The porta cabins at the 115 locations in the Capital can accommodate 7,080 people but the pandemic has brought that down to 2,832, according to internal DUSIB data accessed by Millennium post.
The occupancy on Wednesday was 1,995 but on Tuesday night it was 2,739 implying that most porta cabins are working on the revised full capacity.
One official in DUSIB said, "We have given it to NGOs who take care of the porta cabin and its requirements and we provide them with allowances unless it is some major construction work required which the department does on its own."
A senior official added that since it is a porta cabin, facilitating hot water supply is not feasible. However, it is uncertain for how long the "temporary makeshift arrangement" will continue as a permanent building is yet to come up near Townhall in the Kachha Bagh area which will ease the load.
"The land is yet to be given to us by the MCD and I don't see it happening anytime soon as this year there is a financial crunch too. Probably next financial year work may start," a senior official aware of the project said on account of anonymity.
The porta cabin at the Dangal Maidan may not have a future either as a multi-level parking lot project is expected to come up this year at the venue.
