Eleven shelters for the homeless built by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has over 80 vacant beds, while several pavements in the city are filled with homeless people.
The commissioner of the KMC wrote to Kolkata’s police commissioner this week seeking the police’s help to shift the homeless to the shelters that have vacancies, officials said.
Mayor Firhad Hakim had last week said the KMC would provide a list of vacancies in each of the shelters to the police.
A survey conducted in 2018, following an order from the Supreme Court, showed that the city had 7,272 homeless people. The numbers may have grown since the outbreak of Covid as the pandemic had robbed many of their livelihoods, forcing them to move to the city in search of work, KMC officials said.
Conversations with KMC officials and an NGO that runs some of the shelters revealed that of the 860 beds in all the shelters, about 85 are vacant.
Multiple factors have been blamed for beds remaining vacant despite the number of homeless people far outnumbering the vacancies.
These include the distance between the shelters and the sites of income for homeless people, separate dormitories for men and women (which make it difficult for families to live in the shelters) and the enforcement of some sort of discipline that takes away the independence of the street-dwellers.
While beds in the shelters remain vacant, newer pavements are getting filled with homeless people. “I see more people on the pavements around Gariahat than before,” said a Ballygunge resident.
“The street-dwellers often say it is not possible for them to shift to places that are far away from where they are living. One of the reasons is their income is linked to these places,” said an official of the KMC.
Metro visited a shelter in Beleghata on Friday and also spoke with some street-dwellers in Moulali.
The shelter in Beleghata had separate dormitories for men and women. Before letting in inmates, the authorities check whether they are alcoholic. Every night, the residents are required to enter the shelters by 10.30pm. They are allowed to leave after 4am.
“We depend a lot on what the local police tell us about the homeless people before letting them stay in the shelter. We also speak to shop-owners in the places where the homeless people spend their days to know about them,” said a manager of the shelter.
When this newspaper asked a group of homeless people in Moulali if they were willing to shift, they said they were keen to live under a roof. “Who wants to stay under the sky?” said a woman, who lives with her husband and two daughters.
But when told that the shelters have separate dormitories for men and women, she turned silent. “How can my husband and I stay in separate rooms for days,” she said.
The lack of privacy is a hindrance for young couples. They find more privacy in shacks they set up along roads, said a researcher on the urban poor and homeless.
“Across the country, the shelters are built without speaking to the people who will be asked to move to these places,” said Sairam Raju, a senior associate with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore.
Raju said the homeless people are largely categorised as beggars but they also perform functions that have remained unrecognised. They work as waste-pickers and house help. “The money they earn is not enough to afford bus rides between the shelters and the places where they earn,” he said.
KMC officials said five more shelters — two in Jadavpur and one each in Chetla, Kalighat and Muraripukur — with 700 beds will be opened within three months. Construction of three more shelters, with 500 beds, has started.