CHENNAI: The Mayor may have identified 33 low-lying areas that have been waterlogged this monsoon, and arranged 54 community shelters for people whose houses were inundated, but what hardly anyone has realised is that most of these areas coincide with the pockets that Chennai’s homeless reside in. “As many as 25 areas have been identified where homeless people and pavement dwellers reside most - in the suburbs, North Chennai and pockets of Central Chennai,” confirmed a Chennai Corporation official. Of these areas, 19 coincide with the waterlogged areas identified by the Corporation. Their only answer to the homeless? “People have to use the 15 night shelters that we have established,” said the official and added that no other measure had been made to aid the homeless.“The shelters ideally should have been established so that they are within a 5 km radius of where these settlements are. When the city’s homeless are occupied with nearly 197 different occupations, it’s impossible to expect them to take their family to some location very far away just to use the night shelter,” explains Vanessa Peter of ActionAid. In fact, the homeless people have a certain sense of relief during the monsoons - “this is the only time when the Corporations ‘kollai (stealing) lorries’ don’t come to clear us out, because they’re busy with other things,” says a homeless child gleefully.But the Chennai Corporation says that this could be one of the last times that the homeless will have to face the rains, sans a roof. “Within six months, the housing tenements that are being constructed by the TN Slum Clearance Board at Ezhil Nagar, Perumbakkam and Thoraipakkam will be completed. These will be allocated to the 2800 families that have been identified as homeless by the Corporation. After that, they will no longer be rain affected,” said a source in the Corporation. If the project gets completed on schedule, a portion of the homeless will get succour, but what about the inter-state, intra-state migrants?
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