The former laws officer of a West Bengal state government department has written to the Chief Election Commissioner of India to include street dwellers in the electoral rolls of the country.
Responding to an article published in The Plurals, Biswajit Mukherjee, former law officer of West Bengal Pollution Control Board, and secretary, Paribesh Academy, Chandannagar, wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner, pointing out that the street dwellers have equal voting rights with other Indian citizens.
“There is no doubt that pavement dwellers are also citizens of India and they have the right to participate in the election process. But due to the extreme poverty lakhs of people are forced to live on the pavements in different cities and therefore nobody cares for their democratic rights,” writes
Mukherjee, referring to a report published in The Plurals on May 2 by Jayanta Basu titled “‘I have all papers except death certificate, but no one came for SIR’: Street dweller”.
‘Black Hole’ of democratic system
“As per the Census of 2011 there are lakhs of people who are homeless… (and living on the pavements or in the different railway stations or in different public places. No political parties have ever thought about such people and therefore lakhs of people of India are voiceless and we view it is as a ‘Black Hole’ in our democratic system,” Mukherjee’s letter says.
Mukherjee requests that a system should be developed to include the homeless in the democratic system. “If necessary the Election Commission may arrange a discussion involving the political parties for developing the methodology to bring the homeless into our democratic system,” the letter says.
Neither mapped nor unmapped
“The missed pavement dwellers do not belong to either the ‘unmapped’ or the ‘mapped’ categories” in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, conducted in West Bengal before the elections to revise the voter list, the report had said. “According to the 2011 Census of India, there are nearly 70,000 pavement dwellers, categorised as ‘houseless population’, living in the streets of Kolkata,” the report had added. “Several independent studies, though, indicate that the number may reach up to several lakhs, depending on how ‘homelessness’ is classified,” it further said, mentioning that the last Census also shows that West Bengal had a total homeless population of 134,040 individuals. More than half of them live in Kolkata, with the remaining population lives scattered across other districts such as Howrah, North 24 Parganas and South 24 Parganas The pavement dwellers are simply invisible to the latest electoral process in the largest democracy of the world, the report says.