SC wants chief secretaries' meeting on shelter for homeless

The Supreme Court Thursday asked the Centre to convene a meeting of the chief secretaries of the states and administrators of union territories to ascertain what steps have been taken to set up temporary shelters to accommodate the homeless urban poor as winter has already set in.

The bench of Chief Justice H.L. Dattu, Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice A.K. Sikri said the Centre would convene the meeting within 10 days to find ways and means to provide temporary shelters to the urban poor.

"It is desirable that a responsible person of the urban development ministry will call a meeting of the chief secretaries of all the states to find out what steps they have taken for implementing the scheme of urban homeless people," the court said in its order after a brief hearing.

Asking the government to file a report on the action taken by it within three weeks, the court passed the order observing that it could not make out anything from the affidavits filed by some of the state governments as to what they have done.

The court declined to take up the issue of temporary shelters in Delhi as it said the Delhi High court was already seized of the matter and was monitoring it.

However, the counsel representing the Delhi government told the apex court that 147 temporary night shelters and 84 permanent shelters have been set up in the city and both together can accommodate 17,000 people.

Pointing out that facilities for the homeless poor in Delhi did not cover even half of them, counsel Prashant Bhushan told the court that according to the Delhi government's own census, there were 39,000 homeless in the national capital and what was being made available covered only 17,000 people.

He said that even the existing shelter homes did not have basic civic amenities of water and sanitation.