The Underworld

In an India under construction, flyovers, like the internet, have come to denote connectivity and speed, reach and ambition. And even as mall to metro and arcade to airport distances have narrowed down as countless millions whiz past a few hundred feet above the ground, there is an equal number that has made the earth below their own, manufacturing a parallel universe under the country's gigantic flyovers.
Their world is the underworld, where they exist, oblivious to the traffic zipping by. Take, for instance, Manoj Kumar Shah who calls the dead space under Delhi’s Sarojini Nagar flyover his home. Shah, who is wheelchair-bound, has been living under the flyover with his wife Radha, friend Raju and a motley group of others for a while now.
Most of them are undergoing treatment in the nearby Safdarjung hospital. Shah, too, came from Bihar over a year ago to get hip surgery done. Even as he waits for the hospital to operate on him so that he can get back to his village and meet his two children, he makes ends meet by begging."Living like this is not easy," he says.
"You have to be alert at all times, otherwise your belongings get stolen. My mobile phone was stolen just the other day. There is a dharamshala nearby which won’t provide me shelter. I have to commute on my own to the hospital every day to get medicines. But, at least, after a year now I have finally managed to get a date for my operation in September."
In many ways, Shah’s situation is similar to Ganesh Dhanji’s, living under the BRTS flyover at Ahmedabad along with 15 other families. Again, most of them have come to the city for treatment. The Sola hospital, where they are being treated, has no beds for them. Dhanji says they have no choice but to make the flyover their home. "Till we get well, we would be staying here," he says with a touch of resignation that speaks volumes of the state of affairs in government hospitals.
The world under the flyover often sees people from disparate groups sharing common space. Besides those for whom hospitals have no beds, the underbelly is home to countless labourers — who work hard to build the very cities which do not have a decent roof and four walls to offer them. The area under the Ber Sarai flyover in Delhi, for instance, shelters almost 30 families from Madhubani in Bihar. "We used to live in a jhuggi nearby, but it was demolished a few years back. We then shifted under the flyover," says Sulekha, who works at a construction site . "When the Commonwealth Games were happening last year, the police removed us from here, but we came back once the event was over. This is the only home we know. Where else will we go?" she asks.
It’s a question to which few have credible answers. Under the Delhi Master Plan-2021, there should be one shelter for every one lakh people. Meaning, if a city has a population of 50 lakh, there should be at least 50 shelters. That’s not how it works, though. The actual numbers are much less. Incidentally, the spaces under flyovers which are maintained well are not inhabited as there is a higher chance of police action in the lit-up patches. The homeless prefer generally ignored and dark corners. The Delhi government says it now wants to reclaim all such clusters to ensure proper development.
That’s easier said than done. The problem is not just reclaiming these spaces but also providing viable alternatives — often a difficult proposition due to the collusion of local officials and those they are meant to target for the clean-up. Under the Gariahat flyover in Kolkata, for instance, a number of people have squeezed themselves into the car parking zone. It often makes parking tricky. "We made several attempts to remove them. But the police seem more interested in making sure that they remain. These settlers regularly bribe them and it is a steady source of income for the cops," alleges former mayor and West Bengal’s minister for public health and engineering Subrata Mukherjee.
The dilemma of dealing with this particular brand of homelessness, a new phenomenon that has come into existence with the rapid construction of flyovers, is one that almost every city is grappling with. Chennai has 19 flyovers of which 13 are under its municipal corporation’s control. While the city adds to its flyovers every year, its corporation has only six shelters for the homeless. A corporation official says flyovers are mostly used by immigrants who come alone to the city. But according to estimates, there are over 40,000 homeless in the city — and that includes people with families, even those working as maids, cooks and drivers.
A particularly vulnerable group is small children. Jockin Arputham, advisor for SPARC (Society for promotion of area resource centre), a Mumbai-based NGO, says his organization is working at sensitizing the government to protect children living under Mumbai's flyovers "on an urgent basis." The urgency is in place as the flyover’s underbelly is often the city’s underbelly too —where drug addicts and petty criminals often converge. Prostitution, too, is routine around some of the flyovers, like the one near Delhi’s Moolchand that suddenly transforms into a red-light area as darkness descends.
The irony, of course, is that flyovers are by definition intermediaries. They connect places. For many, though, they are the destination. Home. And it’ll take a lot to change that.
(With inputs from Chittaranjan Tembhekar in Mumbai, Paul John in Ahmedabad, Prithvijit Mitra in Kolkata and Karthikeyan Hemalatha in Chennai)