Homeless sleep under parked vehicles

Homeless persons are forced to take refuge under parked vehicles to save themselves from the freezing cold in the national capital. Some destitutes were seen sleeping under a parked garbage truck at the Hanuman Mandir in Connaught Place.

NGOs working for the destitutes said daily seven or eight homeless persons sleep under the parked truck at the same spot.

“Every day we see around eight persons sleeping under the same garbage truck in front of Hanuman Mandir area. When we talk to them they say they don’t have anywhere else to spend the night so they sleep there,” said Sunil Kumar Aledia, founder of the NGO, Centre of Holistic Development.

“We have been carrying out night vigils and almost on every night walk we find people sleeping under parked vehicles across the city,” he added.
NGOs said they have been demanding more shelter homes in the vicinity.

“We have been asking Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) to set up more shelters in the Hanuman Mandir area for years now. But in vain,” said Indu Prakash Singh, National Convenor of the National Forum for Housing Rights. “The population of the homeless has increased in the area manifold over the past couple of years,” Singh added.

There are six shelter homes in the New Delhi Municipal Council area. According to the figures compiled by the NGO, four more homeless persons have succumbed to cold on Friday, taking the toll of unidentified bodies to 225 mark in the city. NGOs claim that around 80 per cent of these bodies are those of the homeless.

DUSIB said that many of the destitutes are drug addicts and they sleep in the open and fall prey to such bitter cold.

But the NGOs said these homeless people have nowhere to go for help as only three government-run drug de-addiction centres are functional out of the total 32 centres.