Homeless deaths: Delhi

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.

The extent of the problem

Summer (April- June) deaths, 2011-2015

Homeless deaths in the Delhi summer (April- June), year-wise: 2011-2015(till May); Graphic courtesy: The Times of India, May 28 2015

See graphic: Homeless deaths in the Delhi summer (April- June), year-wise: 2011-2015(till May)

Winter (Dec- Jan) deaths, 2015-17

Homeless deaths turn into political slugfest, January 9, 2018: The Times of India

Homeless deaths in the Delhi winter (December-January), year-wise- 2004-2018
From: Homeless deaths turn into political slugfest, January 9, 2018: The Times of India

The biting cold continued to take its toll on the homeless, with data from the zonal integrated police network showing that at least 44 unidentified bodies had been found in the city since January 1.

Every winter month, hundreds of bodies are found at various locations — such as near railway tracks, in drains, on railway platforms and footpaths, and outside hospitals — and while, eventually, they become a part of the grim statistics, an uncomfortable questions remains unanswered: whether all these victims were homeless, and if it’s the cold that killed them.

The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board has now written to Delhi Police, seeking a report on the latest figure and the cause of death in these cases. Between the Januarys of 2004 and 2018 (till January 6), as many as 40,633 unidentified bodies were found on city roads.

Data for the current year showed that while most of these bodies were found near metro pillars and footpaths, the cause and circumstances of the deaths were not known. Citing the figures, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday took on DUSIB. He tweeted: “Media reporting 44 deaths of homeless due to cold. Am issuing show cause notice to CEO, DUSIB. Negligible deaths last year. This year, LG appointed a useless officer. LG refuses to consult us before appointing officers. How do we run govt like this? (sic)”

Currently, DUSIB’s 261 night shelters have a capacity to house 20,934 people. Singh claimed the peak occupancy during nights this season had been 13,810. He added that there were times many homeless people refused to move to shelters.