Mumbai (Bombay)

Degrees of Homelessness

These 5.8 million people can be divided into groups representing different degrees of homelessness. The first and most severely affected group is of people who sleep out in the open without any cover—on park benches, on the beach, on the pavement, on a road divider, on a railway platform, or at a bus stop. Such people survive on daily wages, possess only the things they can carry, and are constantly on the move as they are never permitted to remain in the same spot for long. Either the municipal demolition squad or the police ensure that they are chased away.

[Page 398]The second category of homeless consists of “pavement dwellers” or people who have set up house on sidewalks. These people build a small leanto, usually made of a plastic sheet or tarpaulin supported by bamboo poles. A wall running along one side of the pavement serves as the back wall of this structure. There are almost 20,000 households who live under these conditions. Many of them have occupied the same spot on a pavement for several decades. Every once in a while, a “demolition squad” from the local municipality removes these structures. But because these sidewalks are not policed to ensure that no one squats on them, the same people usually return and occupy their original patch.

The third category of homeless consists of people who lead an equally precarious existence as the pavement dwellers but live in a slightly better quality shelter. These are people who have discovered vacant land along the railway tracks. Mumbai has two commuter railway lines that run from the north of the city to its southern tip. Thousands of families discovered that no one policed the vacant land along these tracks. So they set up homes, first temporary shelters and before long small homes made of brick and mortar. However, even if they have a better quality of shelter than the pavement dwellers, their lives are equally insecure. As with pavements, the railways attempt to clear this land by sending in bulldozers. And the families, whose only “home” is crushed in the process, have no alternative but to save what they can and try to find another spot on which they can squat. At last count, there were over 23,000 households living along Mumbai's railway tracks.

...