Homeless people die in large numbers as northern India suffers coldest January in a decade

Rough sleepers in Delhi suffer toxic air, a raging pandemic and scarce access to night shelters during a freezing winter

Homeless people take refuge under a bridge in Delhi as northern India’s temperature dips to extreme levels (Sunil Kumar Aledia/Centre For Holistic Development (CHD))

Last week, when Delhi recorded the coldest day in almost a decade, a homeless man on the streets of the national capital slept through the night holding a dead body close to him until volunteers from a nonprofit arrived to help.

Rajkumar, a daily wage labourer, has lived in Delhi for the last five years but is yet to get a roof over his head.

He is one of the city’s official tally of 46,724 homeless people – a number activists say could be barely a third of the real figure for rough sleepers in the capital.

Rajkumar sleeps near Delhi’s Kashmiri gate, a bustling area where interstate buses arrive every hour. The person next to him had lost his life during the night when temperatures dropped to a low of 6C. Daily maximum temperatures have dropped as low as 12 degrees below the average for a Delhi winter day, making it the coldest January in nine years.

Volunteers from the nonprofit that helped Rajkumar had found him along with another man who needed medical attention after surviving a rainy night sleeping out a footpath. The third man, who Rajkumar had been holding onto for warmth, was not so lucky.

According to an unreleased report from the Centre for Holistic Development (CHD), the nonprofit that comprises of “silent volunteers” including lawyers and policy researchers that helped Rajkumar, at least 176 homeless people died in January in Delhi because of exposure to extreme cold.

A lack of official record-keeping of homeless deaths makes it difficult to find a comparison for last year, but according to the India Environment Portal (IEP) 152 deaths were recorded across India as a whole due to cold waves in 2020.

CHD’s researchers analysed data from India’s homeless shelters and local records of deaths on footpaths, along with its own surveys, to determine the number of deaths recorded in January. And the figure of 176 deaths is only up to 30 January, the organisation says. According to Sunil Kumar Aledia, an experienced activist with the organisation, the number of deaths recorded for January could still go up in the coming days.

“Sometimes dead bodies lie abandoned on the footpaths and we find out about the deaths several days later,” says Mr Aledia, who has been venturing out in Delhi’s chilly nights to help the homeless.

“All three weathers – winter, summer and monsoon – always result in deaths of homeless people [in the city],” he says.

“Homelessness is a disaster situation. We talk about malnutrition or hunger but you can’t act on those issues unless you tackle homelessness.”

According to CHD, deaths have been rising in busy areas like north and east Delhi, where several small businesses are located and which witness an influx of people coming from other states in search of work.

While one drive across the city is enough to see the increasing number of the city’s homeless – many of whom take refuge under bridges, in parks and footpaths – the government’s step towards preventing deaths among the homeless has been limited to setting up night shelters.

A barefoot, homeless person huddles next to a bus stand during a chilly winter night (Sunil Kumar Aledia/Centre For Holistic Development)

The Delhi government’s night shelter scheme has been highly publicised, but according to activists and people living on the roads, spaces are becoming harder to come by. And for those who get access to beds, the situation isn’t necessarily better than what they suffer on the roads.

Delhi has 296 shelter homes with over 9,000 beds. The homes, however, work on a first-come, first-serve basis. The centres, often temporary settlements, lack basic facilities like toilets or medical care despite several promises made by authorities to provide these.

The number of beds in shelters is not even half the government numbers reported in previous years, with lack of data being the biggest problem, activists say.

And while the number of beds was already an issue, the Covid pandemic has made things worse.

Shelter homes are forced to adopt social-distancing norms, allowing an even smaller number to be taken in during the night. Covid has also wreaked havoc on the unorganised sector – cash-in-hand workers – forcing many small businesses to lay off helpers.

According to activists, a majority of the homeless population in the city comprises of people working in unorganised sectors as labourers and helpers or of those pushed to begging or selling items on the streets.

“Most of these people work in the unorganised sector where they are paid by the day,” says Sanjay Kumar, an activist with the charity Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan who runs a homeless shelter in the city. “These workers have no other place to go than to spend the night in the open, and look for work again in the day.”

He estimates the homeless population in the city to be around 100,000.

“In my experience, one per cent of the city’s population is homeless,” he adds.

Activists working with the homeless find a dead body lying near a footpath (Sunil Kumar Aledia/Centre For Holistic Development)

India defines homelessness as those who do not live in census houses, while the United Nations Economic and Social Council has a broader definition for homelessness, including security of tenure, affordability, access to services and cultural adequacy.

Activists have time and again raised concerns about the lack of data when it comes to the counting of the homeless population, something that is also in a state of flux because many workers move to cities only during a certain season.

The government, however, is yet to carry out a detailed seasonal survey.

“There should be a proper mechanism to take a survey during winter, summer and monsoon. This can easily be real-time data but the government is not willing to do it,” explains Mr Aledia.

Those sleeping on the roads are not only suffering through cold weather, but also high air pollution. India’s air quality levels have remained poor in the month of January at above 200 while Delhi has borne the brunt of the country’s toxic air crisis for several winters now.

India’s extreme weather conditions are also only likely to intensify in the coming years. According to climate experts, the unusual cold the country is witnessing this year goes beyond what would be expected from seasonal changes.

The harsh winter conditions this year are partly a result of La Nina, an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Nino and which drives temperatures downwards, according to Aarti Khosla, the director of Climate Trends, a climate communications initiative.

“This was anyway supposed to be a year of La Nina. But given how throughout last year first we had the heat stress, then back to back cyclone and concentrated monsoon, the cooling was more than natural as well,” says Ms Khosla.

“Definitely there is a climate impact on all of this,” she says, adding that while one event may not be entirely attributed to climate change, the severity of these instances is definitely related.