The Urban Community Development (UCD) wing of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has been making efforts to map the homeless in the city with shelter homes close by and provide them access to basic health services.
In a recently-conducted survey, the UCD wing freshly identified a total of 1,562 persons living on the streets in the city across the circles. Already, the functional shelter homes being run under the GHMC are housing close to 500 homeless persons.
Apart from these 14 shelter homes, the corporation has enumerated a total of 114 privately-run homes across the city, some of them housing the aged, and some others, orphans.
It has emerged during the survey that these 118 homes give shelter to more than about 6,000 inmates, and except four or five, all provide free services to the destitute.
“We are trying to map the homes, government as well as private, to the homeless found in the recent survey area-wise, and send them there,” informed an official from the UCD wing.
To make government schemes and programmes accessible to them, the corporation has also been making efforts to get them registered with the UIDAI (Aadhaar), and enrol the eligible ones among them as voters. Each home has been tagged to the nearest Aadhaar centre for easy access to registration.
Besides, all the 118 homes have already been tagged with primary health centres, urban primary health centres and Basti Dawakhanas (neighbourhood clinics) in the vicinity to provide them access to basic healthcare services, the official informed.
“We have made arrangements for doctors from these centres to visit the homes once a week and conduct basic health check-ups,” the official said.
In case of homeless mothers with children in tow, the process is on to tag them to the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) so as to provide them with nutritious food and other facilities under the scheme, she said.