Even before India’s tough coronavirus lockdown began, Priya Kale and her family were scraping by in a cockroach-infested shelter for the homeless in New Delhi.
Now, her husband has lost his cleaning job in an office and Kale can’t go out to look for odd jobs, leaving the couple and their five children dependent on meagre handouts of rice, lentils and flour. India has about 1.7 million homeless people, according to census data, though civil society groups say the real number could be closer to three million.
Every day, thousands of people arrive in the capital from the countryside in search of work and a better life. But an acute shortage of affordable rental housing means many end up in slums or sleeping rough. Less than 10% of Delhi’s estimated 200,000 homeless people find accommodation in a shelter like the one that Kale’s family shares with nearly a hundred other families in northeast Delhi.
A lot of the homeless people are migrants from other states. We heard that some of them have gone back to their villages, even though there are no trains or buses to take them. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow or next week or next month. We don’t know when we can go to work, when the children can go to school. If we get rations, we can eat. Otherwise we might run out of food.”
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
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