HYDERABAD: A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based survey of homeless in all the 74 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) including Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation and Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) through a third party will commence shortly as per the directions of the Supreme Court.
Department of Municipal Administration(DMA) entered Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with VMax e-Solutions (India) Private Limited about three days ago for conducting survey as per Supreme Court directions.
The Supreme Court while passing the orders had observed that there was a huge mismatch regarding the number of urban homeless between final report submitted by Committee on Shelters constituted by Supreme Court and the figures submitted by certain states in their affidavits filed before Supreme Court.
In view of this, Supreme Court has asked Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation to carry out a systematic survey for identification of urban homeless at ULB level through a third party survey and the same should be completed by March 31, 2018, so that actual number of identification of urban homeless figures in the state could be validated and a report on the outcome of the third party survey of urban homeless can be furnished.
MAUD issued instructions to departments concerned to conduct third party survey for identification of Urban Homeless at ULB level and to complete before March 31 this year. Municipal officials told Express that survey will be taken up in three phases. Each ULB will be divided into smaller ward level clusters in line with withing the administrative set up of the ULB, survey teams will be deployed depending on size and population of the clusters by the survey agency. The field survey will begin from 8 pm to 2 am as homeless people are usually identified and contacted at this time.
Each team comprises four persons for field survey which include women from Town and Slum Level Federations, Selg Help Groups, NGO representatives, homeless youth volunteers and youth volunteers from National Service Scheme & Nehru Yuva Kendra.A standard questionnaire format has been developed by MEPMA for entire state and agency would follow the same for collection of information through mobile app. Real time web based dashboard will be provided to view real time progress of survey and geospatial information of each application on map by survey agency. A plan of survey of homeless population in each ULB will be prepared by the agency in consultation with the municipal commissioners of ULB concerned.