The Greater Chennai Corporation will carry out a third party survey to systematically identify the urban homeless and provide accurate details of the number of shelters required to accommodate them.
The survey is being undertaken after the Supreme Court directed all the States and Union Territories to submit reports on the outcome of the third party survey of urban homeless before March 31, 2018, officials said.
“We are currently in the process of identifying the third parties. Once they are finalised, the survey will be carried out, and submitted to the higher authorities as directed,” said a senior official from the Chennai Corporation.
Earlier, a SC-constituted committee had sought directions from the Court to have a third party survey at the urban local body level due to mismatch in figures submitted by the committee and the individual States.
The Committee, in its report, pointed out that while all States had conducted their own surveys, it had not been authentic as different figures were submitted at different stages and that few States had allegedly gone to the extent of reducing the number of urban homeless to avoid setting up new shelters.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation too had agreed for conducting a third-party survey.
The mismatch of figures on the number of shelters constituted was also observed in a Supreme Court order dated November 8, 2017, where the numbers mentioned in the final report of the Committee did not match the figures quoted by a few States in their affidavits filed before the Court.
Chennai city currently has 47 shelters and the Corporation is in the midst of opening three more, but the total number still falls short of the Supreme Court ruling, which mandates that every city must have one shelter for every 1 lakh population, making the number for Chennai around 70.
