Migrants battle boredom and anxiety at Delhi’s shelter homes

“If the morning tea isn’t so watered down, life will be better,” Tuntun Kumar says, with a shy smile.

“If the morning tea isn’t so watered down, life will be better,” Tuntun Kumar says, with a shy smile.

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Kumar has just had his lunch — two pooris, potato, rajma and rice. It was preceded by a breakfast of tea and bread pakora and will be followed by evening tea and biscuits, and a dinner of rice and dal. “The food is good, but the lunch timing of 1pm doesn’t suit us. We, masons, are used to eating by 10-11am,” his friend, Rakesh Kumar, quips in.

The Kumars are among four masons who had walked 60 kilometres from Sonepat in Haryana to the Anand Vihar bus terminal on March 29 in the hope of getting to their hometowns in Bihar, before they were lodged at the Sarvodaya Co-education Secondary School in Patparganj.

It is one of the 328 shelter homes set up by the Delhi government for accommodating migrants and the homeless during the lockdown. The shelters can accommodate 57,270 people in total and are occupied by 11,500 people currently, a senior government official said.

The conversation, meanwhile, has woken up Sunder Mahto, a furniture loader in Kirti Nagar before the lockdown, who also failed in his attempt to get back to his home in Bihar’s Begusarai. He was sleeping in late as he couldn’t doze off at night. “There is such persistent buzzing of mosquitoes that it is as if they are trying to lift me from the bed,” says Mahto.

“If the lockdown isn’t lifted after April 14, we plan to leave and walk along the railway tracks till we get back home,” says Tuntun Kumar. He has only ₹1,600 in his pocket. “I call the contractor every day, but I know he is also in trouble,” he says.

Government officials, however, said that if the lockdown is lifted, it is unlikely that they will be allowed to leave the shelter and return home on their own. “Lifting the ban doesn’t mean the spread of the virus is over. So, there will be a standard operating procedure in place for transporting them to their homes in sanitised buses, with adequate social distancing,” an official, on the condition of anonymity, said.

While white circles painted on the ground help enforce social distancing when the migrants queue up for their meals, the concept of distancing goes for a toss inside the classrooms where they are staying. With a limited number of power outlets to charge their mobile phones, four to five men lie down on mattresses next to each other and watch a film together on a phone.

The staffers at this shelter have had it easy with the migrants so far. “The civil defence volunteers have been able to enforce social distancing outside the rooms,” says Anil Kumar, the manager of the shelter.

The situation is different a kilometre away, at Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in Ghazipur, where the volunteers, cooks and contractors are struggling to convince those housed there that the facilities are the best that they can provide in the circumstances.

Ashok Kumar, who worked at a factory in Ghaziabad until the lockdown, got into a confrontation with the staffers on Wednesday morning because they insisted that each member of the family should queue up individually for meals. “My mother won’t let anyone leave the room. She is afraid we’ll all contract the disease if we all queue up for meals,” he says.

Despite white circles to ensure social distancing under the watch of volunteers, Kumar’s mother remains defiant. “It is better I die than my children.”

The management here has refused to concede to their demands. “It is not practically possible for one member of a family to collect food for all of them,” says Rajender Swaroop, the in-charge.

Bipin Rai, a member of the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB), which runs 238 shelters in the city, said the government is trying “every means” to provide a comfortable stay at these shelters.

“Whenever there is a requirement of soaps and even shampoos, we are providing it to them. We have medical teams deployed at each school, which has been turned into a shelter. The teams check the body temperature of all occupants daily and also provide medicines for regular illnesses. So, we are trying our best to keep them happy and engaged,” he said.

Some at the occupants have complained about the taste of food and alleged that stale food is served when they return for a second helping. “My children and I won’t eat your food anymore,” an angry Sunita, who stayed in Nangloi, where her husband used to work as a tailor, tells SK Gulati, the contractor at the Ghazipur shelter.

She was also miffed that she and her husband were allowed to take food only in two plates despite informing that they have to feed three children. “We were told to collect food for our children in the two plates,” she says. A total of 23 people live in the classroom she is putting up at, but most of them prefer to stay close by joining cots.

Swaroop says that while the supply of raw food materials is sufficient, it is not the same case with disposable plates. Earlier in the day, some women had allegedly attacked them because he had turned down their demand for new plates when they came for a second helping.

Contractor Gulati, meanwhile, attempts to pacify Sunita. “Didn’t you like the rajma-rice we prepared? I personally supervised it and used branded spices,” he says, with a gesture that reveals deep bruises on his left arm.

“I was beaten up by the police when I went to collect vegetables from the Ghazipur mandi,” he says.

As there are 395 migrants at the shelter home, the management has started the token system to keep them in a queue. “When we serve bread pakora for breakfast, some people ate three to four, leaving none for others,” says Swaroop.

Electricity connections were pulled out from tubelights to let the occupants here charge their phone. But that hasn’t stopped them from clustering. Some formed small circles to play cards, while others sat in small groups to chat.

While these two shelters being run by the government provide the migrants four meals a day, only two meals, at 1pm and 7pm, are served at an NGO-run shelter in Sarai Kale Khan.

Among the 50-odd migrants, who are sharing space with the 400 homeless people, who were staying since before the lockdown, is 28-year-old Mandu Tiwari, seated cross-legged under a tree, with a steel plate in front of him, awaiting his first meal of the day.

But Tiwari is all smiles.He has taken a bath and has donned fresh clothes after almost a fortnight, as his belongings were stolen outside Nizamuddin Metro station, where he spent the first few days of the lockdown. “Someone at the shelter gave me his clothes,” he says.

He had walked for three days from Rajasthan to Delhi in the hope of catching a train, but spent the initial days outside the Nizamuddin railway station until the NGO took him in. “I haven’t spoken to my family all these days. I don’t remember their phone numbers, as they were saved in the phone that got stolen,” he says, brushing aside questions about his prospects of retaining his job at an automobile parts factory.

While ‘tehri’ (flavoured rice) and potato-brinjal vegetable are served to him and the dozens around him, a civil defence volunteer scolds a woman who has brought her children for the meal. “None of you are wearing masks. Didn’t I tell you to take food for your children?” Pawan Chauhan tells her.

“The government must provide a projector and screen to educate these people about the severity of the threat,” Chauhan says.

However, those an official of the NGO running this shelter says that it is getting difficult to provide two meals a day. “The money we receive is sufficient to serve just two meals. We will be in a tight situation if the lockdown continues,” says the official, who didn’t want to be named.

Another government official, meanwhile, said that about 1,800 hunger relief centres are also providing lunch and dinner across Delhi to ensure people don’t go hungry. “We are feeding at least 1.2 million people every day,” the official says.