Homeless want NGO out

Homeless living at a shelter home at Chabi Ganj area in Kashmere Gate want to run the facility on their own. 

They said they will allow their brethren to sleep for free.

At present the NGO running the shelter home is charging Rs 6 as ‘sleeping ticket’.

The shelter home at Chabi Ganj is a three-storey building having a capacity to accommodate around 300 homeless people.

As many as 197 destitutes living here have chalked a plan to manage the operations of the shelter home.

According to their proposal, four persons will be deployed as caretakers in rotation. Each shift will be of four hours and there will be two sanitation workers to maintain hygiene, said Birender who has been living here for over two years.

The destitutes said the NGO, Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan, is taking Rs 6 as ‘sleeping ticket’ from them.

“The NGO has started taking money from April 26. These days nobody carries coins. The problem is we have to give Rs 10 and we don’t get the rest of the amount back,” said 52-year-old Ashok.

When Deccan Herald asked the caretaker at the shelter home said, “We always find it hard to return coins. So we try to take money from five persons together which is Rs 30 and give them five sleeping tickets.”

Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan runs around 25 shelter homes across the city.

To bring the issue into notice, they wrote a letter to Lieutenant Governor and Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), a government body which looks after shelter homes.

The DUSIB gives around Rs 35,000 to an NGO per month to manage operations at a shelter home. Homeless said they should be given the money by DUSIB and they will provide the services for free to the homeless.

“The DUSIB should appoint a team for monitoring the operations at the shelter home,” said Birender who has been living here for over two years.

‘Own kitchen’

The destitutes also want to start their own kitchen. “We would want to start our own kitchen so that homeless can get at least a few mouthfuls of food,” said Birender.

“The government can at least give us the operations of the shelter home on a trial basis and if it’s successful we can get it for full time,” he added.