Under Grey Smoggy Skies reveals India's urban homelessness problem

Invisible to most, Harsh Mander's latest book peels back the layers of injustice and neglect that the urban homeless experience in our cities

Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities

by Harsh Mander

Published by Yoda Press

196 pages ₹499

 

Throughout my career as a student and professor of Indian politics, I read about India’s great republic and its noble constitution. This document describes equality and welfare as its guiding principles and proclaims certain directives for the governments to follow while formulating policies for the welfare of its citizens. With the passage of time, my own understanding of Indian society went beyond this theoretical imagination and I noted the presence of class-inequality, discrimination and the myriad layers of injustices prevalent in society. As the republic grew on the path of modernity and economic growth, there was a spike in urbanisation and the consequential mass migration from rural to urban areas. Rather than accommodating a mass of people as equal beings living a dignified life, these urban areas, however, are even more exclusionary. 

This is the theme of Harsh Mander’s latest book, Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities. In it, Mr Mander explores the inner lives of millions of urban homeless who have made road pavements as their homes. A renowned social activist, his decades-long association with the urban homeless makes this collection of essays an authoritative account on the subject. 

Under Grey Smoggy Skies is a path-breaking endeavour to uncover the darkest underbelly of modern India. It presents a first-hand account of India’s urban poor and documents the state failure in rehabilitating them. In 2011, more than 2,000 shelters were established in different cities following the Supreme Court’s intervention. In response to the Supreme Court’s comments that described homeless people as parasites, Mr Mander defines homeless people as “... the city’s most destitute and dispossessed working people. Unprotected by the state, by any labour law, or any union, they crowd on numerous street corners each morning — be it winter, summer or the monsoons — in what we call ‘labour chowks’.” 

Each of the 20 chapters of this book peels back the layers of injustice and neglect the urban homeless experience despite legal and constitutional guarantees. In “What Life is Like for Those with No Home”, Mr Mander documents the police brutality, harsh weather and mis-treatment of the homeless by the privileged speeding their upscale cars over those sleeping on the streets. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, the lives of India’s poor are nasty, brutish and short. “Hunger and dispossession are the routine fate of homeless persons in every city. Unclaimed corpses especially during winter bear silent testimony to the saga of homelessness,” Mr Mander writes. 

In “The Little Hand That Tugs”, Mr Mander presents a distressing portrayal of Delhi’s street girls who have been abandoned or escaped from their abusive fathers. These girls are longing for a safer place and dream of going to school. The author describes how, after months of negotiation, the Delhi government had opened two residential schools for street children, only to be closed again in May 2025. 

Another chapter, “Worlds Apart”, documents the binaries in India’s class division, a division between affluence and poverty, abundance and hunger and luxurious homes and pavements.  Mr Mander believes that the urban poor have been the result of crony capitalism as a model economic system that profits one class while pushing another at the bottom of the economic development pyramid. He says the widening gap between the rich and the poor has given rise to widely varying living standards and class-consciousness. India has 195 million undernourished people, 75 million people in extreme poverty and almost three million people are homeless. Yet, the country has 308 billionaires, ranking third  after the United States and China. These numbers not only speak of the glaring income disparities between the rich and the poor, but also of the contrasting lifestyles of the two classes. 

However, Mr Mander squarely blames state failure for the pathetic conditions of India’s homeless millions. Thousands of lives have been lost while navigating the legal system to secure proper rehabilitation facilities for those without a home. He shows how these rehabilitation centres are not permanent and have often been demolished to make way for highways and urban beautification projects. Mr Mander believes that state intervention must be grounded in humanistic care and rehabilitation should be a permanent programme, not an event management or episodic project.

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The reviewer is an academic and freelance writer based in Kashmir