India’s migrant crisis pointed to another problem – its lack of shelter homes

On March 24, when the government announced a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, India was served a fierce reminder that its cities are, by design, exclusionary. Millions of workers around the country were left cashless, hungry and in many instances, homeless. Many of them set out for their villages hundreds of kilometres away – on foot.

Several state governments introduced measures to force desperate, unemployed migrants into shelter homes. But these measures were inadequate even as stop-gap alternatives, let alone as effective policy strategies. They not only underestimated the scale of the crisis, but strongly suggested the state’s unpreparedness or unwillingness in finding a more viable solution to the sudden problem of large-scale homelessness.

Three limitations

The approach had three main limitations. First, there just are not enough shelters anywhere, in any major city to comfortably accommodate the vast numbers of workers who had been stranded. The Ministry of Housing Affairs’ Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihood Mission, in its revised guidelines, states that shelters should be able to accommodate 100 of every 100,000 people in each city. That number was derived from an estimate of the India’s homeless population as per a Supreme Court order in 2012.

While the estimates over the number of homeless...

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