Civil Society Monitoring Group report to SC says only 12 of the existing 25 homeless shelters in TN function

C Shivakumar

Chennai:

A total of 25 shelters of homeless exist in Tamil Nadu as against the need for 123 shelters as per the Supreme Court guidelines.

Interestingly, of the 25 existing shelters for homeless declared by the state government only 12 are functioning says a civil society monitoring group, which submitted its report to the Supreme Court Commissioners recently. The report has urged the state government to ensure that the 13 non-operational shelters across the 10 corporations be made operational on a priority basis.

A Supreme Court guideline directs Central and state governments to provide permanent 24 hour homeless shelters in a minimum ratio of one shelter of capacity 100 persons for every one lakh of urban population. With Chennai’s population as per census is 65.60 lakh, there is a need for 65 shelters for homeless.

Interestingly, the state government’s effort to expand the intervention for homeless across the 10 corporations, including Chennai, Salem, Coimbatore, Madurai, Trichy, Tirunelveli, Tirupur, Erode, Vellore, Thoothkudi  and few other municipalities is being hailed by the group.

Action Aid’s Vanessa Peter says the move by the state is appreciable but there is no uniformity of the homeless intervention across the 10 corporations. The budgetary allocation is there only for building the shelters but there are no allocations for the recurring expenses required to maintain it with the exception of Chennai, which passed a resolution recently.

According to an estimate based on the draft guidelines of Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (Housing division), the per capita operating cost per shelter per person per day in Tamil Nadu is worked out at Rs 63.41 by the group in its report. This works out to Rs 25 lakh per shelter, the report added.

Meanwhile, there are 12,371 people who are homeless in the state, according to a government data. In Chennai alone there are 11,116 people who are homeless. However, civil society group disputes the data. A joint enumeration conducted by the monitoring group along with state government officials found out that in Tirupur there were 994 homeless people instead of 99 as per the government statistics. Similarly, in Salem the figures were 1,118 homeless as against 103 stated by official statistics.

The report submitted by Civil Society Monitoring Group to the Supreme Court Commissioners stresses the need for the state to evolve a policy for homeless, which could be based on homeless policy of West Bengal.