SUH Schemes

• The National Urban Housing & Habitat Policy (NUHHP), 2007 aims at promoting sustainable development of habitat in the country with a view to ensuring equitable supply of land, shelter and services at affordable prices to all sections of the society. However, the most vulnerable of these are the urban homeless.
• The urban homeless persons contribute to the economy of the cities and thus the nation as cheap labour in the informal sector; yet they live with no shelter or social security protection. The urban homeless survive with many challenges like no access to elementary public services such as health, education, food, water and sanitation.
• Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana - National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM) aims at providing permanent shelter equipped with essential services to the urban homeless in a phased manner under the Scheme of Shelters for Urban Homeless (SUH). Homeless persons include persons who do not have a house, either self-owned or rented, but instead live and sleep on pavements, at parks, railway stations, bus stations and places of worship, outside shops and factories, at construction sites, under bridges, in hume pipes and other places under the open sky or places unfi t for human habitation.
• It is understood that many occupants of shelters are engaged in work during the nights (e.g. as head-loaders), and thus need shelters to sleep in, during the day. Casual workers also often do not get employment on a daily basis, and so they may need shelters during the day and not just at night. Therefore, DAY-NULM envisages providing shelters available to the homeless during the day as well as night.

The objectives of the Shelter for Urban Homeless (SUH) component of DAY-NULM scheme are to:

• Ensure availability and access of the urban homeless population to permanent shelters including the basic infrastructure facilities like water supply, sanitation, safety and security;
• Cater to the needs of especially vulnerable segments of the urban homeless like the dependent children, aged, disabled, mentally ill and recovering gravely ill, by creating special sections within homeless shelters and provisioning special service linkages for them; Provide access to various entitlements, viz. social security pensions, PDS, ICDS, identity, fi nancial inclusion, education, aff ordable housing etc. for homeless populations;
• Formulate structures and framework of engagement for development, management and monitoring of shelters and ensuring basic services to homeless persons, by state and civil society organizations including homeless collectives.