Homeless Pavement Dwellers: A Case Study of their Social Awareness in Kolkata from Human Rights Perspective

Abstract

Since the last few decades, ‘homelessness’ has become an important international issue inviting attention of the Human Rights Commission. At present, there is hardly any country without homeless urban poor who are facing serious trouble during winter and rainy seasons both in developed and developing countries and take shelter at public places. India is not an exception. The United Nations adopts a universal strategy in the rights of Human Settlements, and the UN-Habitat was created in 1978 as a follow-up measure. The Human Rights Commission has adopted a resolution in 1991 on homelessness during the last two decades. The UNCHS was actively involved with issues relating to improvement of cities and shelter provision for the urban poor. However, basic human rights related to safe and secure housing have been the universal issue. In 2003, the UN-Habitat Report stated that there were 924 million people, or 31.6 per cent of the world's total urban population, who live in life- and health-threatening houses. Now, the homeless population has become more than a billion in the world. About 45 per cent of the urban population of all developing regions combined and 80 per cent of the urban population in the ‘least-developed countries’ are homeless and deprived of fundamental human rights. India has more than twenty million homeless people, and Kolkata alone has one million homeless people. This paper focuses on pavement dwellers of Kolkata in the backdrop of human rights and attempts to suggest some measures for their rehabilitation. The main objective is to discuss their social demography, social structure and economic life with special emphasis on the demographic change that has taken place between 1990 and 2007.