A media report said, during this winter nearly 300 houses were demolished near DPS Mathura Road in Nizamuddin area. A woman Lalita Devi has been quoted here as saying that she also lost her source of livelihood in the same demolition.

While people here are quoted as saying that they have lived here for a very long time, the authorities said that they demolished the homes after consulting satellite imagery which did not show any settlement here in 2006. This is also a new situation when other evidence such as documents with people are not considered and instead satellite imagery is used. The demolition took place without rehabilitation effort so that the people here have become homeless in acute winter.

Five homes were demolished in Khirki Extension area near Malviya Nagar as well. A woman Chandrawati said they had no clue when the demolition would take place, and in fact she was cooking the family meal at the time. This is another case of demolition leading to more homeless people.

It is shocking and distressing that the impact on the health or even survival of people when suddenly thrown out in the biting cold weather mixed with high air pollution conditions was not even considered by the authorities while taking such actions.

If more people are being rendered homeless by such actions, then is the number of shelters for homeless people being increased?

No, says another report. It tells us that one reason why there are so many homeless sleeping out in the biting cold of Delhi is that “in the past one year , several night shelters operated by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) have been demolished and also because such shelters are not entirely safe for women and children.”

What is more, this report quotes activists working on this issue as saying that “DSUIB is fighting a case in court to demolish more shelters in Yamuna Pushta here.” As those familiar with the homelessness scene in Delhi know, the Yamuna Pushta has long been known for a high concentration of homeless people.

The existing shelters can’t be properly used by homeless people much in need of these who, particularly many women, prefer to sleep in the open even in the bitterly cold weather rather than go into the shelters. When the concerned reporter further visited the shelters, some of the complaints were confirmed further.

It appears that the survival conditions for the homeless people have been deteriorating even in the capital city where earlier quite a significant effort was made for improvement. One shudders to the think of the conditions in several other cities where this issue has received much less attention. As the Supreme Court had given significant directives for improvement, these should be monitored at the national level to find out to what extent these have been followed in the right spirit.

Meanwhile, to prevent the further worsening of the distressing situation, any further demolitions during the winter should be stopped and clear instructions should be given that even later, demolitions should take place only when these are unavoidable any demolitions that cannot be avoided should be accompanied by a rehabilitation effort.
—
The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include “Planet in Peril”, “Protecting Earth for Children” and “A Day in 2071”. He was earlier associated with a leading programme to help homeless people and contributed several booklets and articles on this subject

Courtesy: CounterView

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To be guilty is a spur for works that supposedly highlight those nagging reasons for feeling guilty.  You might supply donations.  You can become a philanthropist.  You can join a charity.  Obscenely, you can become a creature of mocking persuasion, a person of pantomime: you can assume the position of a poor person, a homeless person, and pretend to be him.  And let it be filmed.

“When I was given the opportunity to spend 10 days experiencing different forms of homelessness for an SBS documentary, I jumped at the chance to understand more about a crisis that now sees more than 116,000 Australians homeless on any given night.” So go the words of veteran thespian Cameron Daddo, a person who never explains how understanding Sydney’s poverty leads to results, other than spending time on the screen and proving rather awkward to boot.

The individuals involved in the tawdry Australian spectacle Filthy Rich & Homeless have various reasons for participating.  They have a chance, not merely to appear before the cameras, but to explore another part of Sydney.  What matters for Skye Leckie is the anger of authenticity.  Socialite that she is, she does not believe that her participation in the venture is “poverty porn” despite being the very same creature who benefits from having a good quotient of poor around.  “Those who say it’s stunt TV are being totally ignorant to the homeless situation out there.”  This is a delicious way of self-justification, a positioned blow to excuse how her exploitation of a social condition is entirely justified by a mysterious, holy insight.  Her pantomime, in other words, is heralded as genuine.

Benjamin Law, author and very much an identity beacon (those things help these days), played the cool cat.  In such ensembles, it’s always good to have the confidently composed, the person who won’t fall for the pathos of the show.  “I went to Filthy Rich and Homeless being adamant that it was only 10 days, and that I wasn’t going to cry – I felt it’d almost be insulting to people who were actually homeless.”  So goes his justification for actually participating in the project: he would hold firm, stay calm, keep his tear ducts dry.  “But when it’s demonstrated that this could easily be a family member, and someone you love, I couldn’t not be affected.”

The show is sugary fodder for social media masturbation, an ever so prodding tease for those who feel pangs of stirring guilt.  Nonsense about “genuine compassion” and “empathy” whirl through the chattersphere, with a disconcerting gurgle of approval at the program.  The implication is clear: like true porn, it produces a release, an orgiastic sensation.  The poor are sociological wank fodder.  In the aftermath is the little death, or should be.  Such programs float on the froth of sentiment, and last longer than they should.

There are shades of the carnivalesque, as Michael Bakhtin called it, in this exercise.  The tradition of the carnival, he explained, suggested alternate worlds, inverted ones where social orders might, just temporarily, be suspended.  The performer, and the audience, would become one.  Communal dialogue might emerge.  But the participants will eventually go home; the nobility will revert to their high standing, and the poor will undress and return to their squalid, putrid existence.

Feudalism and tribalism may have made their official exit in the historical textbooks, but we still find stirrings of old custom in the media industry.  The poor are there to be mocked; the vulnerable are there to be, in some form, exploited.  Gone is the exaggerated chivalric code, as meagre as it was (keeping people in place), and the presumption of charity.  In its place is the clawing, scraping urge of the media moguls and networks keen to capitalise upon a condition, a disability, a drawback.  Poverty is visual and lucrative for all – except the impoverished.

An obvious flaw in this project – several wealthy members of society burying themselves in the poor underbelly – is contrived anonymity. The monarchs supposedly travel incognito amongst the slums.  The participants supposedly become unknown for a time.  The King and Queen scrap around the hovels.  But who recognises them?  Presumably everybody.  Not having a home, or living in indigence, doesn’t mean not having access to the saturation coverage called the World Wide Web.  The camera crews might be a giveaway, the very reality of which produces distortions in the interviews.

The grotesque scene uncovers itself, and the tears, spilling on cue, supply catharsis.  “Most interesting,” noted the Sydney Morning Herald, “is just how little time on the street it takes for them to be reduced to tears.”  To be fair, they only had ten days, so the performance clock was ticking.  The filthy rich feel justified – they acknowledged pain and desperation.  The poor, their role achieved, can simply go on living.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org
 

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Photo credit: Gosselin Blog

A report prepared by UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing which is to be presented today in UN Human Rights Council, highlights the extreme scarcity in availability of proper housing to 58.6 million households.

A deeper study of the report brings out that among this large community, schedule castes and schedule tribes, homeless people, Muslims and manual scavengers are the worst hit. Access to housing is abysmally below the national average for this segment.

Around the same time when the Report was being prepared, housing rights activists comprising of 70 representatives from 9 different states of India had gathered to share experiences and evolve strategies to solve the housing problem, in a meeting called by National Alliance of People’s Movements and Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan on 8^thJanuary this year.

Major point of discussion of this Coalition of Housing Rights Groups that met on January 8^th, was addressing the challenges posed by rampant evictions, denial of land rights, livelihood opportunities and basic services to poor communities living in informal settlements which goes unchecked in the absence of any legal prudence.

The UN Report and the deliberation of the Coalition, both seek to build upon the orders of the Supreme Court of India in the matter of ‘right to housing’. The Supreme Court of India in 1995 in the Chameli Singh vs. State of UP matter emphasised the centrality of the right to housing as precursor to all rights. Successive judgements on similar matters in the Supreme Court, reiterate the similar concerns.

Proof that very little has been done in over two decades by various governments is borne out from the fact that the need for housing has more than doubled to 58.6 million units (Special Rapporteur report 2017) from 23.90 million in 1991 (Government of India – National Buildings Organisation, Ministry of Urban Affairs & Employment). It also proves that all the governments over the decades had ignored the order and sentiments of the highest court of India.
 
The UN report as well as the deliberation of the Coalition also concluded that the ‘Pradhan Mantari Awas Yojana’ under the ‘Housing for All Mission’ of the central government of India, will only cater to the demand of one particular section and recognized the possibility of discrimination in implementing the policy.
 
An important thing that emerged from the experiences shared by the Coalition was that what very often is overlooked while estimating the shortage of housing is the connection between housing and livelihood. Livelihood is a key factor which defines the need, affordability and character of housing.  So, any solution that seeks to protect housing right should consider livelihood as the integral part of the problem.
 
As far as ‘Smart Cities Mission’ of the central government in the ambit of housing is concerned, the inference of the Coalition was that the mission is highly exclusionary in its approach which will give minimum space to the poor, reduce citizenship into consumers, highly expensive and the principle of democracy will be compromised at every level of planning and implementation of the mission.
 
One of the strongest recommendations of the Report is a need for a national legislation that will address problems relating to housing rights. This very recommendation in the Report is in resonance with the demand that was raised by the Coalition at the end of the deliberation. The Coalition finally concluded that a campaign would be chalked out at a national level in near future to demand a law which would protect the housing rights keeping livelihood as its integral part.  
 
 

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