The Wire
Since August 21, close to a hundred residents of the slum colony in Gurugram have been sitting on a dharna.
Since August 21, close to a hundred residents of the slum colony in Gurugram have been sitting on a dharna outside the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram building, demanding rehabilitation for all who have been displaced.
Most of the residents of the Shyam Chandra Jha Colony slum had been affected by the COVID-19 lockdown. For a month now, they have had nowhere to live.
Gurugram: Sangeeta Singh had been a resident of Shyam Chandra Jha Colony – a slum in Haryana’s Gurugram populated by daily-wage labourers – for her whole life. Suddenly, on July 21, her house and the slum were razed by a bulldozer.
Singh was born in the Colony. “It was formed at least 40 years ago. And now we have been displaced, our houses are gone,” she says. Singh’s house was razed in a drive undertaken by the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram, in which it wiped out at least 20 houses in the area. These houses were makeshift buildings that made up the slum.
Singh says that two days later, July 24, the MCG returned – this time to destroy nearly 500 slum houses of the colony. The exercise rendered all of the Colony’s inhabitants, including women and children, homeless. Since then, they have been putting up plastic sheets for shelter. These, Singh claims, are removed by the MCG every now and then.
“One plastic cover costs a family Rs 500. And all they earn after a day’s labour is about Rs 250. Imagine,” Singh says. The monsoons has increased the problem of living under open skies.
Also read: Forced Evictions Are Unjust. Here’s Why They Should Concern us Even More Now.
“A day before razing the slum, they came in the evening, asking us to take our belongings and leave. They said they would come the next day to raze all our houses and make a park over there. We went to our councillor, who assured us that nothing would happen. But the next day – it happened. They came and destroyed 15-20 of our houses. We couldn’t even save our things; it was all razed off by bulldozers. When we raised concern, we were given a day’s time to remove ourselves from the area. We, who have been living here our entire lives, how could we relocate within in a day? Where do we go?” she said.
Residents of the Shyam Chandra Jha Colony in Gurugram protest near the MCG building. Photo: Ismat Ara
Since August 21, Singh and close to a hundred other residents of the colony have been sitting on a dharna outside the MCG building, demanding rehabilitation for all who have been displaced.
“If the government is removing us from our homes, they should provide us with an alternative place to live in. It is our right as citizens of this country,” Singh said. “If we are being told that our slums were illegal – are they saying that our existence was also illegal?”
According to Singh, the MCG also threatened to lathicharge slum residents.
Also read: Planning for Physical Distancing May Be Challenging, But it Could Solve India’s Housing Woes
‘What about coronavirus now?’
Most residents of the unauthorised colony are daily-wage workers, whose livelihoods have been severely affected by the nationwide lockdown announced to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. “Some work as maids who clean and cook in rich people’s houses and some are labourers. The past six months have been terrible. Our work had stopped because of the lockdown and we didn’t have any money,” Singh said.
“For three months, PM [Narendra] Modi made us all sit at home citing coronavirus dangers. Now what? We don’t have houses now, what about the threat of coronavirus now? The MCG says that we should rent houses. Who will give us money, or work now? We are also citizens of the country. Just because we are poor doesn’t mean they’ll throw us out like garbage. We want to live like human beings,” she added.
Residents of the Shyam Chandra Jha Colony in Gurugram at the protest. Photo: Ismat Ara
According to Singh, the colony had been poorly maintained, lacked basic hygiene and the houses were prone to catching fire. In two fires in the past, many of the houses had been completely burnt. However, there was an anganwadi, as well as an NGO which worked with the women of the area, teaching them skills like sewing.
Rafiq Sheikh, a 70-year-old man with a wounded foot, has also been a presence at the dharna. He said, “We just lived there, it wasn’t as if we were stealing their earth or anything. Assume that I tell you, suddenly, to vacate your house, will you do so? That’s what has happened with us.”
Also read: The Right Time to Speak of Housing Rights in India is Right Now
Sheikh took a dim view of the Haryana government under M.L. Khattar. “They are acting as if they have become kings by giving us bowls to beg for money on the streets. Let them think of us as beggars, but give us our homes, even if as handouts. They say, ‘beti padhao beti bachao‘ – but how do I protect my daughters without a shelter? Without a home? Without access to basic hygiene and education? Without food to eat? They have increased the price of everything. No one wants to hire us anymore because they think we will infect them with coronavirus…what do we do?”
Sheikh has been sitting on the streets for a week now. “When you don’t even have a shelter, other things become insignificant, the fight becomes important,” he said, pointing to the injury on his foot.
“Nobody pays attention to us. We are like cockroaches on the streets. People look at us, but nobody asks why we have weathering the sun and rainfall, spending nights here. The administration only cares about parks and beautiful things, human lives are less important to them,” he added.
Another presence at the protest is Kaushalya, a 60-year-old widow. “When we came here, about 40 years back, I had brought my young son with me. He became an adult here and then passed away. So did my husband. I have been living alone for the past many years, working as a labourer here and there, somehow managing to live each day. Now I feel utterly alone, I don’t have any home,” she said.
Over 20,000 people were forcefully evicted from their homes in India amidst the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report released by the Housing and Land Rights Network. There have been 45 incidents of forced evictions in the period between March 25 (when the nationwide lockdown was imposed) and July 31.
The officials at the MCG refused to comment when The Wire reached out to them.
The Centre has initiated disciplinary proceedings against four officers for “dereliction of duty” regarding the containment of the spread of COVID-19.
New Delhi: The Centre on Sunday suspended two senior Delhi government officers and served show-cause notices on two others for “serious lapses” in duty during the ongoing lockdown.
A home ministry spokesperson said the two officers who have been suspended with immediate effect are: additional chief secretary (transport) Renu Sharma and principal secretary (finance) Rajeev Verma, who also holds the post of divisional commissioner.
The two officers who have been served with show-cause notices are additional chief secretary (home and land buildings) Satya Gopal and SDM (Seelampur) Ajay Arora.
While Sharma, Verma, and Gopal are senior IAS officers, Arora is reportedly an officer belonging to Delhi Andaman Nicobar Islands Civil Service (DANICS).
The Central government has initiated disciplinary proceedings against the four officers for dereliction of duty regarding containment of the spread of COVID-19, the spokesperson said.
It has been brought to the notice of the competent authority that the officers, who were responsible to ensure strict compliance to the instructions issued by chairperson, National Executive Committee, formed under Disaster Management Act 2005, regarding containment of the spread of COVID-19, have prima facie failed to do so, the spokesperson added.
Also read: 22 Migrant Workers, Kin Have Died Trying to Return Home Since the Lockdown Started
The Union home secretary is the chairperson, National Executive Committee.
“These officers have failed to ensure public health and safety during the lockdown restrictions to combat COVID-19.
“Due to the serious lapse in performance of their duties, the competent authority has initiated disciplinary proceedings against the officers,” the spokesperson said.
In its order, the home ministry said Sharma and Verma “failed to maintain absolute integrity and devotion to duty. It is also contemplated to initiate proceedings for the imposition of a major penalty against them.”
Both Sharma and Verma were asked by the ministry to not leave Delhi without the approval of the competent authority.
The lockdown was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday in a bid to combat the Coronavirus pandemic.
The immediate cause of the action is not immediately known.
There has been a large scale exodus of migrant workers from Delhi after the announcement of the lockdown.
The central government has repeatedly asked the State governments and Union Territory administrations to stop the exodus and provide the migrant workers’ food and shelter during the lockdown period.
In the days leading up to the nationwide lockdown, many reports of police attacking homeless people surfaced. With nowhere to go, this vulnerable section of the population cannot ‘stay home’.
Mumbai: In the past week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in every speech he made, stressed on the importance of staying home right now. Given the urgency to curtail the spread of coronavirus in the country, PM Modi said, “Ghar main rahiye, ghar main rahiye, ghar main rahiye (stay home, stay home, stay home).” A similar message was repeatedly broadcast by Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray in his daily video bulletins. “Ghari raaha, surakshit raaha (stay home, stay safe)” was how he ended each of his speeches.
These sermons, however, had no meaning for the 20-odd Pardhi families that were brutally attacked and evicted from the footpath outside Bahar cinema in Ville Parle. During the early hours of March 21, when Dhansingh Kale and his family were sleeping, the police from the Ville Parel police station began beating up old and young alike. Even toddlers were roughed up, Kale says. This attack, he says, was unprovoked and the police wanted the streets to be “clean”.
Govt must set up safe shelter homes before beating up the homeless people n clear streets.
Vile Parle Police lathi charged and beat up men, women and children on the streets. @dyficec activists found this out during their visit to help them 2b safe from Covid-19@OfficeofUT
1/n pic.twitter.com/rfxU38iPzm— CPIM Maharashtra (@mahacpimspeak) March 21, 2020
The Pardhi community, a highly stigmatised and criminalised tribe in Maharashtra and other central Indian states, has always attracted the ire of the police. This Denotified Nomadic Tribe (DNT), some subcastes of which are classified under the Scheduled Tribes category in Maharashtra, live on the fringes, with very little state support.
Since the attack on March 21, the families have dispersed. While some have moved out of the city limits, others have gone to stay with their relatives. Similar cases of the police attacking homeless people have been reported in many states.
Kale, who knows very little about the novel coronavirus, says all he has heard is that mobility causes its spread. “It is the rich, mobile people who got this disease to the country and the government is keeping them in safe shelters to ensure they don’t spread the disease. But why doesn’t it think of us? Evicting us and forcing us to move right now could kill us,” an anguished Kale said over the phone. He and four members of his family are presently put up at a relative’s shanty in Nalasopara, situated in the northern end of Mumbai.
A family living on a footpath. Photo: YUVA
Just ahead of the shutdown, as many as 64,000 passengers, mainly Indians, had returned to the country. Their return increased the country’s vulnerability and to break the chain of a possible community transmission, the entire Maharashtra state first and subsequently the whole of India has been put under a strict lockdown.
This decision may be the only measure available at this hour, but it has a terrible impact on the country, its economy and most importantly, on its most vulnerable class.
Homelessness is symptomatic of every large city which witnesses both inter and intrastate migration. Many nomadic and denotified tribes, like Kale’s, continue to lead a nomadic life, traveling to different places in search of work and shelter. They have for years made footpaths and spaces under the flyovers their houses.
Also Read: How Distressed Rural Migrants Shelter in Cities
The 2011 Census data says there are 57,416 homeless people in Mumbai. This figure is an absolute underestimation, say most people working in the development sector, who argue that the actual figure is at least four times this figure. “Our estimate is at least, if not more, two lakh people live on the streets and footpaths and open spaces in the city. These people lack the most basic facilities and are dependent on daily labour work,” says Jagadish Patankar of the Centre for Promoting Democracy, an organisation that works closely with the urban poor.
Over a decade ago, the Supreme Court in its judgment on the homeless persons in the country had directed each state to take their problems seriously and build one shelter home per one lakh population. The judgment observed:
“Article 21 of the Constitution states that no person should be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to the procedure established by the law. Over the years, this Court’s jurisprudence has added significant meaning and depth to the right to life. A large number of judgments interpreting Article 21 of the Constitution have laid down right to shelter is included in right to life.”
If the civic authorities had honoured the Supreme Court’s judgment, Mumbai, with a population of over 1.84 crore, should have at least 184 shelter homes. But it only has 18 functioning ones, of which over 12 are exclusively run for minors. Another five, the state official claims, will soon be set up.
A homeless shelter in Mumbai. Photo: By arrangement
So, for families like Kale, when the state shirks its responsibilities off, the only option available is to survive on the roads.
For administrative purposes, the term “homeless” or houseless are defined as those who live in “the open or roadside, pavements, under fly-overs and staircases, or in the open in places of worship, mandaps, railway platforms etc.”
By this definition, only a minuscule 0.14% of the total population can be termed as “homeless”. Under this definition, the families living outside the Jogeshwari railway station are not homeless. These 250-odd families had lost their houses in a demolition drive that was conducted two years ago. Since then, they have lived in broken structures, trying to cover themselves with tarpaulin sheets every time the weather gets rough.
“These families are dependent on neighbouring bastis, and buildings for water. Since the state announced a complete lockdown, the families here are desperate for drinking water, leave alone to wash their hands and for other sanitary purposes,” shares Pooja Yadav, a project coordinator with Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA). Yadav, who had been to the shanty last week, says the families there are on the brink of starvation without jobs, water and shelter.
“The police have been using force and raining lathis on those trying to fetch water. I met several women who expressed difficulty in accessing toilets. Many menstruating women did not find enough water to follow sanitary practices,” Yadav shared.
Also Read: India Needs a Human Rights Approach to Housing, Says UN Special Rapporteur
Sitaram Shelar, convenor of Pani Haq Samiti, a collective that has been addressing the issue of water in the state, estimates around 20 lakh people in the slums – both regularised and termed “illegal” – under the Mumbai Metropolitan Region are deprived of access to water. “The government gives multiple reasons for this. In some cases, the land they are living in is disputed and in some, the process of documentation delays the process. Either way, it is the poor who suffer.”
YUVA is a community organisation that has been working in some of the poorest wards of Mumbai’s civic bodies. In the past week, their volunteers have been traveling to bastis to identify the most vulnerable families and provide them with food grains that would last for at least a week.
A woman cooks on the footpath in Mumbai. Photo: YUVA
Building shelter homes is the responsibility of the individual municipal corporations and councils, which receive funds from the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM).
Ravi Jadhav, the state shelter manager, appointed under the DAY- NULM, agrees that a lot needs to be done in the state. “There are around 76 shelter homes in the state. Efforts are constantly being made to increase the capacity of the existing ones and also have new spaces and organisation identified to run the shelter,” he told The Wire. Jadhav also said that the state is yet to direct them to take any new measures to arrange protective living conditions for those on the road. “There has been no communication about the coronavirus so far,” he said.
In reality, however, Maharashtra, like any other state, has only managed to tie up with different NGOs involved in helping the urban poor. Most of the 76 shelter homes are temporary ones that are available only for night shelter. These spaces are not adequate in terms of sanitation and space. The tie-ups with the NGO were not done in accordance with the demand on the ground, but arbitrarily on the basis of the willingness of the organisations to tie up.
“Maharashtra has been violating the Supreme Court order for over a decade now. Forget the underplayed figure of population explosion in the state, the government here is not even able to provide for those it enumerated in the 2011 census,” Patankar points out.
YUVA distributing relief kits. Photo: YUVA
Amrutlal Betwala, a community worker, said the situation on the ground is alarming and he fears deaths due to starvation. “Forget the coronavirus, some families will certainly die of hunger,” he said.
YUVA’s relief kit contains pulses, rice, wheat flour, oil and salt. “This is the bare minimum, but it will at least ensure they survive,” shared Amit Gawli, another volunteer. In one week of survey work, Gawli had managed to reach out to several aged and disabled persons in Malwani slums.
He said the slums lack water facilities and feared the lockdown could have a catastrophic impact on the lives of thousands living in precarious conditions.
Even before the state government had announced a lockdown, Anganwadi workers in Mumbai had to stop working. This meant that children in most slums of Mumbai were not getting their daily food and, putting additional strain on the adults of the families. One Anganwadi worker who works in Mandala, a north-eastern slum settlement of Mumbai, told The Wire that she has been reaching out to NGOs to step in until the state makes some provisions available.
“There are at least 20-25 kids in my locality who will starve if food is not made available to them immediately. I raised some funds locally and arranged for glucose biscuits and rice puffs. But this won’t suffice,” she said.
Most parents have been lining up at her residence, asking for help, she says. “My heart breaks to see them in such a desperate condition.”
In 2014, PM Modi had promised houses for all homeless people by 2022. He said over four lakh houses, and not just shelter homes, were to be built by 2022. This promise, six years on, feels like rhetoric.
But in the extraordinary times that we are living in right now, if the coronavirus infection enters the community transmission level, its effects, especially on the homeless citizens, would prove deadly. It remains to be seen whether the government, at least to contain the virus, will ensure the right to life with dignity of homeless persons and provide them with shelter and hygiene.
It has been 12 days since the residents of a makeshift camp erected to house families displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam have received food.
As long as she can remember, Kanchan Bai has subsisted on food from the farmlands of the Narmada river. But she lives in a temporary relief shelter now, after the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the world’s second-largest dam, began to fill its reservoir, flooded her house and sent her there.
It has been 12 days since food from the shelter’s authorities has stopped coming through. Kanchan Bai, 60 years old now, has been living on rice gruel and watery dal for the last week. The camp is located near the now-submerged Nisarpur village of Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar district. It houses over 400 families that share a similar fate.
Already impoverished agricultural labourers are rapidly running out of options for even a square meal – leave alone fair compensation.
Kanchan Bai in her room at the makeshift camp near the now-submerged Nisarpur village. Photo: Anjali Rao Koppala
The camp consists of multiple rows of tin sheds. Every family gets one room, and every room has an electric fan and a window. Twenty rooms share a water tank, four bathrooms and toilets, most of which are dirty and nearly unusable. Some water tanks have already become defunct, so there isn’t much water available for cleaning and washing. There are no waste bins either, there are little mounds of garbage in the open, each a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other vectors of unhygienic living situations.
A garbage dump near the Nisarpur camp’s toilets. Photo: Anjali Rao Koppala
The camp serves the people housed here three meals a day, mostly comprising dal or a vegetable, rice and roti, as directed by the Narmada Valley Development Authority (NVDA), a government body that oversees rehabilitation work.
The NVDA has been issuing tenders each month since August to supply food, water and electricity to the camp, and building more sheds. There aren’t many takers, and as older contracts expire, the government is slow to issue new tenders. As a result, many families have stopped receiving food on time, or sometimes at all. Worse, they are likely to be evicted in a week or so because the lease on the tin-sheds is running out.
And then there’s the bureaucracy to contend with. “The provision for food was originally meant to last till October 15 but was extended till the end of that month,” Srikanth Bhanot, the district collector of Dhar, said. “We have now raised the issue with NVDA officials, who have the final authority in deciding the matter, and unless they give further orders, we cannot resume providing food.”
Rahul Yadav, an activist with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, said, “Until every family gets rehabilitated and compensated as per the provisions of the NWDT Award and Supreme Court ruling, the NVDA officials cannot evict these people nor stop providing them with food, water and other amenities.”
Resettlement and rehabilitation
The government set up such camps after the Supreme Court asked it in 2017 to vacate families living in the dam’s submergence area by July 31 of that year, and to pay Rs 60 lakh to each family that couldn’t buy agricultural land under an older state government scheme and an additional Rs 15 lakh to each family that had been duped by land brokers and middlemen.
A member of the Narmada Bachao Andolan makes a list of people yet to receive compensation. Photo: Anjali Rao Koppala
The court also directed the state government to complete resettlement and rehabilitation by the same deadline. However, the Madhya Pradesh government couldn’t keep up, and instead setup 17 temporary camps across Barwani, Dhar and Alirajpur districts, each like the one Kanchan Bai lives in.
The state paid for these sheds from a Rs-900-crore special compensation package that Shivraj Singh Chouhan, then the chief minister, and a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, had instituted. This package was originally meant to provide Rs 5.8 lakh to every displaced family to help build a house. Neither the package’s papers nor the Supreme Court ruling said anything about tin sheds, but that didn’t stop the government from appropriating the money and forcing hundreds of people to depend on the camps as their only shelter.
The displaced people are also eligible to receive 60 × 90 sq. of land each (or a smaller plot for those who were displaced after the rehabilitation provision in the NWDT award, notified in December 1979). So together with the Rs 5.8 lakh, they had hoped to have a roof of their own. Some of them did receive the plot of land but without their money, there is little they can do with it. Even others were awarded plots at distant locations, on uneven land or in places with abject connectivity.
Santosh Shankar is a 35-year-old agricultural labor who neither received the plot nor the money, even though his name features on the list of affected families. Most members of the affected families are labourers like Shankar who work on farms for daily wages.
But the Sardar Sarovar Dam has drowned most of these lands, leaving big farmers cash-strapped and farm workers without work. Shankar is one of the few people in the region with a BPL card that entitles him to 25 kg of grain through the public distribution system. But many others don’t have these cards, and Shankar said that even if one did get the plot or the money, builders would need at least six months to erect a house. That’s a long time to keep searching for food.
Santosh Shankar with his children at the Nisarpur camp. Photo: Anjali Rao Koppala
Paro, 45, said, “We used to earn an honest living but in these temporary shelters we have been reduced to beggars.”
Obviously the people in the camp are angry, and a palpable tension hangs in the air. “Had the rehabilitation work gotten over six months before submergence, as per the Supreme Court order, or Gujarat had not pushed for filling up the reservoir until this work got over, this situation could have been averted,” Medha Patkar, the activist and social worker leading the Narmada Bachao Andolan, said. “But they still did it illegally, violating not just the tribunal award and the law but also the judgment.”
Kailash, a 38-year-old camp resident, said, “We will protest in front of the collector’s office if they do not resume serving food.” But he quickly remembers that this office is 113 km away, and going all the way there would mean giving up on a day’s work, and wages.
While benefits resulting from the dam accrue predominantly with Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh has the most people affected by the project, and also severely lags behind Gujarat and Maharashtra in resettling and rehabilitating them.
One of the more dire consequences of the state’s failure is that the camps’ residents expect to be homeless in a few days, at least if local authorities don’t act immediately.
Anjali Rao Koppala is currently pursuing a master’s in development at the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
By the end of this century the world’s population will have increased by half, creating a housing problem that needs to be solved now.
Credit: Pixabay
By the end of this century, the world’s population will have increased by half – that’s another 3.6 billion people. According to the UN, the global population is set to reach over 11.2 billion by the year 2100, up from the current population which was estimated at the end of 2017 to be 7.6 billion. And that is considered to be “medium growth”.
The upscaling required in terms of infrastructure and development, not to mention the pressure on material resources, is equivalent to supplying seven times the population of the (pre-Brexit) European Union countries, currently 511m. With the global population rising at 45m per year, comes the inevitable rise in demand for food, water and materials, but perhaps most essentially, housing.
Housing needs are changing
Average household sizes vary significantly between different continents and also by country. According to the UN, recent trends over the last 50 years have also shown declines in household sizes. For example, in France, the average household size fell from 3.1 persons in 1968 to 2.3 in 2011, the same time the country’s fertility rate fell from 2.6 to 2.0 live births per woman. In Kenya, the average household size fell from 5.3 persons per household in 1969 to 4.0 in 2014, in line with a fertility decline from 8.1 to 4.4 live births per woman.
Increasingly ageing populations, particularly in developed countries, are causing a demographic shift in future care needs, but it also means that people are staying in their own homes for longer, which affects the cycle of existing housing becoming available each year. One of the most marked changes has been the rise in one and two-person households in the UK and other developed countries.
Statistics published by the National Records for Scotland, for example, reveal the influence of these changing demographics, with future household demand rising faster than population growth. By 2037, Scotland’s population growth is forecast to be 9%, with growth in the number of households forecast to be 17%. This 8% difference is in effect the household growth demand from the existing population.
In England, between now and 2041, the population is expected to increase by 16%, with projected household growth at 23%, resulting in a 7% difference in demand.
As people live longer and one and two-person households increase, the number of future households required rises faster than the population. In 2014, urban issues website CityLab dubbed the situation the “world’s ticking household bomb”.
As more developing countries deliver infrastructure and progress similar to developed countries – improving the standard of living and extending life expectancy – household sizes will decrease, placing greater demand on supply of new housing. So if this difference between household demand and population growth occurs globally at around 7-8% over the next 80 years, this will require an additional 800m homes.
Taking an average global three-person household (1.2 billion homes) coupled with that 8% demographic factor of total global population over the period results in a need for more than two billion new homes by the end of the 21st century.
Meeting the demand
The current and future demand for new housing is compelling governments to push for further innovations in “offsite” – prefabricated – construction to speed up the supply of new housing. The UK Industrial Strategy published in November 2017 has a strong focus on offsite construction for the future. This sector has grown rapidly over the last decade with new markets in healthcare, education and commercial buildings. But for prefab construction to deliver more houses at a faster rate means looking at alternative solutions to the problem.
Natural and man-made disasters affect 65m people around the world destroying entire communities, puts extra pressure on governments already struggling to provide housing. Credit: Pixabay
Things that slow down the rate that prefab houses are built include the lengthy preparation time required for sub-structures and foundations; delays to the installation of utilities and building services; and a lack of well-trained construction-site managers capable of delivering the complex logistics involved.
With more than 65m people displaced by man-made and natural disasters globally, this puts further pressures on countries unable to supply enough new housing as it is.
The issue of availability of materials to meet the demands of constructing two billion new homes emphasises the need for countries to resource them as efficiently as possible. Government policies which encourage the sustainable design of new buildings to maximise future re-use, reduce carbon emissions and manage resources properly will be essential. Over the next 30 years, the countries which promote policies to help sustain and increase new housing provision will be more likely to avoid problems in sourcing materials and price hikes.
For many countries, housing supply is a now a hot topic for national debate and policy strategy. For the rest of the world it will soon become the most pressing issue facing governments this century.
Sean Smith is director of the Institute for Sustainable Construction, Edinburgh Napier University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Recognising the symptoms of the dispossessed will prevent crimes against humanity.
Hands of Homelessness. Credit: Wayne S. Grazio/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Every year, over 50 million people in the world will die. Old age, disease, war and starvation all contribute to that number, and scientists, doctors and charities do their best to bring the figure down.
But there is no statistic which accurately measures the number of humans facing social death. The ‘socially dead’ are an increasing section of the global population who are effectively dead. Their hearts still beat, their lungs still breathe, so technically and physically, they are still alive. But this isn’t living as such – it is mere existence.
These are the people who have died before they’re physically dead. Physical death, the degradation and eventual cessation of your ability to function as a body, comes later. Social death is the degradation and eventual cessation of your ability to function as a social being. It happens when you are set apart from the rest of humanity.
It happens when your legal protection and autonomy is profoundly impaired and you have almost no way of defending yourself. Your sense of belonging to a group, culture or place fades and eventually disappears under the pressure of your circumstances, while your roles in life, such as those associated with employment, family and community, are also broken.
Your inter-generational relationships along with your spiritual faith and hope diminish while your physical condition deteriorates. Most importantly, you have lost all meaningful social relationships and are considered valueless in the eyes of society. It is a reality faced by many experiencing profound poverty, chronic illness, homelessness, advanced dementia and forced migration. And by its very nature, it is a reality which is widely ignored.
A group of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees arrives in Rameshwaram island of Tamil Nadu after a risky 30-mile boat ride across the Palk Straits. Credit: Climatalk.in/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0
Specialist researchers have charted the changing profile of social death and its diagnosis in, for example, those imprisoned in solitary confinement, people forced to leave their homeland as refugees and individuals with incurable infectious diseases who are treated as social outcasts. It affects large groups whose communities have been destroyed by natural disasters or targeted by state-sponsored violence, and whose security has been reduced by prevailing political ideology.
So what should we do about the socially dead?
First, we must establish a formal means of recognising them, a task which presents immediate difficulties. Conducting research on those considered socially dead, although much needed, is ethically and practically challenging. By their nature, these people have little legal recourse and autonomy, and so must be safeguarded from exploitation whilst simultaneously being studied.
The principal problem with recognising the socially dead is asking the right question. “How dead is this person?” sounds like a ludicrous question. The response will be: “Is this person dead or not?” It will not lie upon a scale. It will not allow for nuance. As such, how can it possibly reflect the nuances of a person’s lived experience?
To address this, I would argue that social death is similar, conceptually, to a more accessible term: ‘well-being’. This encapsulates all aspects of a person’s quality of life – including both external and internal factors, such as mental health or social class – but critically, these factors have different levels of severity. They can be placed on the scale. It is possible, therefore, to speak of a negative counterpart to well-being, namely “ill-being”.
A social framework
With this approach, we could explore social death quantitatively: to consider an individual (or group) not as being either ‘dead or not dead’ but as existing on a scale of ‘more to less dead’. If a robust framework exists within which individuals or groups may be considered more at risk of social death, then practical steps may be taken to address this, such as securing funding and an international consensus. Some steps have been taken in this direction already.
The late philosopher Claudia Card argued for the inclusion of social death in the UN definition of genocide and the creation of a rigorous legal framework around the term. Extending the legal definition in this manner would, for instance, reappraise systematic acts of rape in war – such as the ‘Brana Plan’ of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia – as explicitly genocidal.
Deathly signs/J.Kralova, Author provided
Part of the Brana Plan – orchestrated by the Yugoslav People’s Army – was to forcibly impregnate female Bosnian Muslims, with the intent that their wider community would disintegrate. Formal recognition of these acts as genocide would strengthen legal sanctions against perpetrators, while confronting a historic wrong.
A similar response to the plight of those who find themselves in the most intolerable circumstances could avoid future injustices and crimes against humanity. We already formally diagnose those with illnesses of the body to prevent physical death. It is time we put more effort into recognising the symptoms of ill-being – so we can prevent social death, too.
Jana Králová is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
