Homeless does not live but merely exist and life as envisaged by Article 21 of the Constitution is unknown to them, observed the Delhi High Court which directed the relocation of five people who were shifted from one slum site to another at the time of the expansion of the New Delhi railway station.

Justice C Hari Shankar was dealing with a petition filed by five slum dwellers in 2008 against their eviction even from the second site on account of further modernisation for the railway station. “Jhuggi dwellers represent a shifting, nomadic, populace... Hounded by poverty and penury, they have no option but to comply (when shifted elsewhere). Slum-dwellers do not stay in slums out of choice. Their choice of residence is the last ditch effort at securing, for themselves, what the Constitution regards as an inalienable adjunct to the right to life under Article 21, viz. the right to shelter and a roof over their heads. As to whether the roof provides any shelter at all is, of course, another matter altogether,” the court observed.