36 ‘addicts’ fled from Delhi govt school shelters last month

According to shelter home staffers as well as the police, most of those who escaped are drug addicts who were brought here from North Delhi areas like Kashmere Gate and Yamuna Bazar.

Thirty-two persons managed to escape from a shelter home operating in a government school in Mukherjee Nagar between March 17 and March 21. Another four escaped from a shelter home in nearby Model Town around the same time.

Addicts’ desperation for drugs is causing them to flee, staffers said.

According to shelter home staffers as well as the police, most of those who escaped are drug addicts who were brought here from North Delhi areas like Kashmere Gate and Yamuna Bazar. Their “desperation for drugs” is causing them to flee, they said.

At the Mukherjee Nagar centre, the escapees took advantage of an unguarded secondary gate of the school to flee on four separate nights. The presence of two unoccupied schools beyond the walls of this shelter home further helped them, said Mahesh Kumar, the school principal. In fact, on Saturday night, as many as 18 people escaped from here.

“We carry out a headcount during breakfast every day. We found that people had escaped during the headcount,” Kumar said.

There were 135 people at this shelter home. On Thursday, only 103 remained. “None of the 21 migrants staying here since April 1 has tried to escape,” he said.

“I feel suffocated here,” a shabbily dressed masked man said, rolling up his sleeve to show injection marks on his arm. On Monday, the 25-year-old man, who worked as a daily wage labourer in North Delhi’s Yamuna Bazar, had made a failed attempt to scale the walls of the shelter home.

He is being treated by doctors for drug withdrawal symptoms.

Kumar said that most homeless persons brought here were displaying withdrawal symptoms, forcing the staffers to seek help from the Institute of Human Behavior and Sciences (IHBAS). “Some of them beg the school staff to arrange drugs and beedis for them. One day, they turned aggressive with us for repeatedly serving rice instead of rotis,” Kumar said.

Amit Pal, another labourer from Yamuna Bazar said that the escapees used to talk about arranging tobacco products and drugs. “They didn’t talk about escaping, but they got away night after night while the rest of us slept,” Pal said.

Now, school staff and civil defence volunteers have been deployed at the points of escape at night. “We have arranged rotis for the inmates and are also holding happiness classes and yoga sessions for them,” Kumar said.

They have also piled up desks along the stretches leading to the escape points. While the desks are clearly not enough to prevent an escape, the school staff said that they hoped that an escape attempt would create noise and alert the people on duty.

Deepak Shinde, the district magistrate of North Delhi, said that the two centres have seen additional deployment since the escapes, and the police have been asked to take legal action.

The police said that an FIR has been registered at Mukherjee Nagar and Model Town police stations. “We have booked the escaped people under a section pertaining to disobedience to an order by a public servant. Our teams are looking for them,” deputy commissioner of police (north-west), Vijayanta Arya, said.

But tracing them won’t be an easy task. “We have only their names and approximate addresses that they mentioned while being brought to the shelters. They submitted neither the copies of their identity proofs nor their photographs,” another investigator said.

None of the 36 escapees has been traced so far.