Government guides homeless to warmth

NEW DELHI: A dirty blanket and a plastic sack were all 75-year-old Ramdev had to shield himself from the cold, wet air. Clearly, these were not enough. But he didn't know that there was a shelter close by at Nizamuddin that could comfort him for the night.
When told about it, Ramdev was keen to move in. But the night shelter was packed. So he had to be accommodated in a corridor aligning the main dormitory.There were 182 men sleeping inside the facility already that could at the most take in 130. There was barely any space to walk.
With the Delhi administration charged with the task by the Centre to get every homeless to a night shelter, and senior officials assigned the job by LG Najeeb Jung to step out during day and night for inspections, TOI joined one such spot inspection at Nizamuddin.
Ashish Joshi of DUSIB led social workers from Society for Promotion of Youth & Masses (SPYM), an NGO, in an outreach drive to guide homeless to night shelters and to find out why many of them do not use them at all.
Just like Ramdev, two women, one of them speech-impaired, were convinced to use a women's shelter at the other end of the road where a flyover links Nizamuddin to India Gate. But not everyone was willing to move.
Gopal (35) lay under a blanket on a footpath with his wife, two children and a dog, along with all their belongings. He refused to move. On prodding further, he said there was no shelter the whole family could go together to, and he was not prepared to leave his wife and children alone at a women's shelter. He also feared moving too far from the spot where he slept as this was where he eked out a living through his makeshift tea stall nearby.
Similar cases emerged on the way. Mohd Azal Hussain, a disabled man shared his story amid sobs. He has been living under the flyover ever since the Nangla Machi slum, where he lived and ran a tea stall, was demolished. He had papers to show that he was promised relocation and rehabilitation by way of a plot by authorities 14 years ago, but instead he was reduced to living on the streets. "Hum kaisey jayein shelter mein? Kaun humein upar lekar jayega (How do we go to a shelter? Who will take us up)?" he said.
At the end of the drive, Joshi said a facility exclusively for families certainly required. "We are in the process of acquiring nearly 30 more tents through an open tender shortly. On Monday, we will work out ways to provide relief to these families and the disabled people under the flyover. The inspections are planned daily so that need-based planning can be done and problems identified," Joshi said.