Does govt have no death records pertaining to homeless populace?

India is home to 1.366 billion people, out of which one million seven hundred seventy-three thousand and forty people are homeless. They die with no identity, no census, and apparently with “no record” in government books.

They are included in the census when they are alive, but when they die, there is no such census, record, or mention of a cause how they died; no one in government cares, said Kaushal Kishore, Minister In State of Housing and Urban Affairs.

In a reply to the query of Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Member of Parliament, Kishore stated that the data on houseless population is covered during the second phase of census i.e. Population Enumeration, but the data on deaths is not collected in the census. There is no mechanism to count homeless deaths in the country under the Civil Registration System implemented under the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act, 1969, he added.

As per GOI, the definition of Homeless/houseless falls as per Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM), which says that 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 constructions sites, under bridges, inhume pipes and other places under the open sky or places unfit for human habitation.

As per the 2011 census of India, Punjab has 46714 homeless people, Haryana has 51871, Rajasthan has 181544, Himachal Pradesh has 4098, UttarPradesh has 329125, Uttarakhand has 11824, NCT of Delhi has 47076, and Jharkhand has 23391 homeless people.