Homelessness on the streets of Mumbai

Homelessness on the streets of Mumbai is not merely the absence of shelter: it is a precarious condition in which the poor sleep in public, seek refuge wherever they can, and face a law that can turn their need for a place to lie down into grounds for arrest. The nightly round-up makes that vulnerability visible, while the seasonal movement of pavement dwellers into the Cuffe Parade Slum shows how survival depends on access to makeshift shelter and the tolerance of others.

Scale and conditions

The narrator describes more than half of Mumbai’s population as homeless, with many people living, eating, and sleeping on the streets. On footpaths and in doorways, individuals, families, and whole communities displaced by drought, flood, or famine huddle together. Their bedding may be only a thin blanket and cotton sheet against the damp of night. The account presents homelessness not as a single isolated misfortune but as a mass urban condition shaped by displacement and extreme scarcity.

Pavement dwellers construct the most primitive shelters on unused strips of land and footpaths wide enough to leave room for pedestrians. The narrator describes their circumstances as the harshest and most brutalizing among Mumbai’s homeless population. When the monsoon arrives, these exposed homes can become dangerous or untenable, driving many residents toward nearby slums. The seasonal shift does not end their insecurity; it transfers their search for shelter into already crowded settlements.

The midnight round-up

Every night, after the midnight closure of shops and public venues, plain-clothes police squads patrol vacant streets for two to three hours in an operation called the round-up. Street sleeping is technically illegal, and police enforce the rule, but not uniformly. The narrator describes a system of practical exceptions: religious devotees, elderly people, amputees, the sick or injured, and itinerant entertainers are generally not arrested for homelessness, though some may be moved on or roughed up. Families with young children usually receive a warning rather than immediate detention.

Other forms of protection depend on what a person can demonstrate or afford. A man with even a menial job can avoid arrest by showing an employer’s card or address. A clean, respectful, educated single man may be able to talk his way out of detention, even if unemployed. Those who can pay a bribe are safe. These exceptions leave the most exposed group with little defense: poor, homeless, unemployed, uneducated young men without money or a convincing account of work. Some are suspected of specific crimes, but others are taken simply because they are dirty, poor, and helpless.

The round-up’s mechanics make that unequal exposure concrete. The city does not supply metal handcuffs for thousands of arrests; squads instead carry rough twine made from hemp and coconut fibres and tie the men together by their right hands. Groups of roughly twelve to twenty arrested men are marched to holding cells by six or eight officers. The men are often too undernourished and defeated to run, so the rope can bind them without heavy restraints. The image is of a chain made from poverty as much as from twine.

The narrator complicates the account of enforcement by noting that the officers are poorly equipped: they carry thin bamboo canes, have no guns, gas, clubs, walkie-talkies, or vehicles for the patrols, and walk their beats without ready backup. He describes them as braver and fairer than expected, and says savage or serious beatings are comparatively rare. That qualification does not soften the consequences of arrest. Round-up detainees may spend days, weeks, or months in prison, and the roped processions moving through the city after midnight appear more forlorn than funeral processions.

Refuge in the slum

The monsoon brings about five thousand pavement dwellers into the Cuffe Parade Slum. They come from across India, and their arrival presses an already overcrowded settlement to provide shelter. After accounting for animal pens, shops, storage areas, streets, lanes, and latrines, the narrator estimates that each man, woman, and child has about two square metres. Crowding creates tension and difficulty, but he hears no serious objection to helping the newcomers or making them welcome. In this account, the slum offers a measure of refuge that the exposed pavement cannot, even though its own housing is insecure and its space severely limited.

That refuge exists beside a sharp material contrast. Across adjoining plots, the Mumbai World Trade Centre Construction Site rises as a modern, air-conditioned complex with shops and displays of jewels, silks, carpets, and crafts. The Cuffe Parade Slum occupies ten acres and holds seven thousand small huts and twenty-five thousand of the city’s poorest residents. The commercial complex has neon lights and illuminated fountains; the slum has no electricity, running water, or toilets, and its residents cannot be sure the authorities will not sweep it away. The comparison places homelessness within a wider landscape of unequal access to shelter, services, and security.

Displacement, exclusion, and community

The seasonal influx also affects the commercial life around the settlement. Before moving into slums, pavement dwellers buy small necessities from shops across the area. Once they find shelter inside, they tend to spend instead at the slum’s own numerous small businesses, which supply goods ranging from food and clothing to kerosene and electrical appliances. Johnny Cigar estimates that slum residents spend twenty rupees within the settlement for every rupee spent outside it. The movement of people therefore changes where money circulates, provoking problems beyond the crowded living conditions themselves.

Other scenes extend the account of urban vulnerability without equating every form of deprivation with street homelessness. In a hidden courtyard in Bombay, children who have arrived from disasters and hardship elsewhere are being sold through a people-market. They have traveled hundreds of kilometres, often alone; buyers and agents bargain while the children watch. Their circumstances reveal how calamity can expose children to trafficking as well as displacement. The narrator’s reflection on hearing this account stresses that such knowledge passes from person to person, heart to heart: seeing poverty does not amount to understanding it, but shared testimony can resist indifference.

The slum’s own practices offer a contrasting idea of justice to the city’s round-up. When two boys fight over religion, Qasim Ali Hussein explains that their neighbors’ council gives them a punishment intended to be both fair and forgiving, and to help save those who have done wrong. The episode does not solve homelessness or erase institutional inequality, but it places communal responsibility beside a system that can confine a poor man for having nowhere lawful to sleep. Across these accounts, the decisive distinction is between treating vulnerable people as a public problem to remove and recognizing them as neighbors whose survival depends on others.