A letter from SC commissioners was followed by an order of the apex court to clothe, feed and protect the homeless in night shelters The winner gets trophies, but the losers, who are the majority, are ignored. What happens to them? The political masters, for instance, are winners in a way. At least they win elections. They get to be affluent and move with the wealthy, again a victory of sorts. That...

Recent directions of the Delhi High Court to improve conditions for homeless people housed in Delhi’s night shelters need to be widely welcomed. At the same time, it should be realised that the problems of the nearly four-million homeless deserve wider and more regular attention as the lack of basic facilities for them at a national level is simply too glaring. Pucca and permanent shelters which can be used throughout...

Each night, as temperatures continue to plunge and Delhi shivers through its coldest winter in the last decade, a few more people lose their lives on its streets. The people who succumb to the cold include rickshaw-pullers, balloon-sellers and casual workers, the footloose underclass of dispossessed people who build and service the capital city of the country and yet are forced to sleep under the open sky. They die because...

Shetty Chauhan, 60, died on the night of 12 January near a busy traffic roundabout in central Delhi. He had been ill with a heavy cold for eight days. Sitting on rubble next to his body just hours after he died, his wife Kamla explained that he had stopped eating and drinking tea prior to his death. When an ambulance took Shetty away, he was dressed in a light sweater and...

Five years after the massive Indian Ocean tsunami, which left a devastating trail of death and destruction, millions of people have benefited from the influx of aid by rebuilding stronger infrastructure, social services and disaster warning systems than existed before the catastrophe, according to the United Nations agencies at the core of the recovery effort. The largest emergency relief response in history was prompted by the earthquake off the coast...