The Bombay high court has, after hearing a public interest litigation highlighting the plight of pavement dwellers in the city, asked the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) to ascertain how much space it would require to build night shelters that could be used to shelter homeless people in the city.
The PIL was filed by NGO Homeless Collective and sought directions to the civic and state authorities to provide adequate shelters for the homeless.
A division bench of justices A.S. Oka and G.S. Patel asked the civic body to also identify areas in the city where the number of homeless people are more and also asked the corporation to inform the court about this by next week. The court said that after receiving information from the corporation the state government would be asked to allot land for the shelters.
Earlier, the civic body informed the court that the state government had rejected seven proposals forwarded by it seeking allotment of land for the initiative. The court was told that the corporation’s proposal was rejected as the land proposed to be allotted was quite small in area.
The petitioner said that for the population of one lakh in a city, there should be one night shelter, as per the National Urban Livelihood Mission (NULM). According to that norm, Mumbai should have 207 shelters. However, only nine night shelters are operating at the moment as against the 25 that were promised in 2012, the PIL said.
