HYDERABAD: On a cold November night, the Court came knocking at the doors of the Good Samaritan, a house for the elderly. The rents were due for quite some time and for reasons unknown, Alwal police decided to implement the Court orders of evicting the aged men and women in the middle of the night.
What is worse is that the police came entirely unprepared with an alternative home for those evicted at midnight. As a result, a group of 35 elderly people, all of them with either a terminal illness or a mental disability, were shuttled between shelter homes, one after another.
Late on Wednesday night, the Alwal police decided to pack the residents of Good Samaritan home for elderly into ambulances and take them to Anandashram, a shelter home run by the Prisons department.
But primarily built for housing the beggars of the city, Anandashram refused to welcome ‘patients’ in their premises. “We only take in people who have a history with begging because the purpose of this place is to reform such beggars. We don’t take in patients,” noted an official from the Prisons department.
At this point, the court officials decided to arrange for an alternate shelter. “We then contacted another NGO, Second Chance Home and they readily came forward to take the aged people and take care of them, so we sent them over,” added M Mattaiah, station house officer, Alwal PS, who later shrugged that they were ‘merely carrying out court orders to evict the shelter home’.
Given a second chance to finally rest on a rather long adventurous night, the recently evicted elders took shelter at Second Chance Home for Elderly, where they are presently under-treatment and being taken care of. “It is just sad that these people were packed in ambulances and vehicles and shuttled between places. When we got to know about the situation we wanted to go personally and assess the situation, but there was no time as they had been packed off from the home before that itself,” said Jasper Paul, owner of Second Chance.
However, the relief is not for long. Second Chance is short of funds and all of a sudden the residents of their Yapral branch has shot up. “We don’t wish to send these people away. We have registered and given in writing to the police to take care of them with dignity,” added Jasper.
Meanwhile, it remains a mystery as to why was the eviction done so abruptly and without due precautions in mind for those who will lose a home, as a result of the evictions.
There is a government-run old age home in Amberpet which houses over a 100 residents where the evicted residents could have been taken but unfortunately they weren’t.