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Paper short abstract

Care infrastructures like the recovery shelters for homeless people in Delhi are characterized by a temporariness in the state’s modernist vision. This vision is contested by the radical act of rehabilitative care to homeless people representing a politicisation of the care infrastructures.

Paper long abstract

Although care infrastructures such as the recovery shelters of the Delhi Municipal Board were instituted to provide rehabilitative support to ailing homeless people, historically shelters have occupied a contested space in the Indian state’s modernist vision of Delhi.

Ethnographic findings indicate that this shelter has been left un-repaired for multiple months owing to an impending demolition. I suggest that a temporariness has become permanently assigned to this shelter. Its temporariness comes from the temporary status that was assigned to the shelter structure by virtue of its physical built form of a portable cabin that was not designed to be a permanent form of occupancy. This temporariness is contested by the provision of care, in a non-hospital setting by a Civil Society Organisations (CSO), representing a politicisation of the care infrastructures in its disruption of the exclusionary and modernist vision of the state. The struggle to exist in this space and provide rehabilitative care for homeless people constitutes a struggle for the appropriation of a space, situated in a site historically associated with displacement in order to secure equitable access to healthcare for a population invisiblized by the state.

I argue that this form of support for the homeless population symbolizes an alternate form of care with a radical disposition challenging inequities in access to healthcare. It is a radical act of care that operates with a vision towards strengthening community-based models of care that are supportive of a strong primary healthcare system as part of a robust public healthcare system.