Winter Days, Rooftops and Roadside Lives: How India’s NGOs Can Save Lives this Cold Season
Every winter Indian cities and towns light up with festivities and for hundreds of thousands of people who sleep rough, the season brings a different reality: shivering nights, respiratory illness, frostbite and sometimes death. Below I’ve pulled together recent, authoritative statistics and practical, evidence-backed ways NGOs can reduce suffering and transform lives not just for winter, but year-round. The scale of the problem (what the numbers say) The Government of India reports that 1,773,040 people were recorded as “houseless” in Census 2011 (9,38,348 in urban areas; 8,34,692 in rural areas). This official figure is the primary national baseline even though experts say true numbers are likely higher because point-in-time counts miss many hidden and intermittently homeless people. Cold waves and winter exposure are not harmless statistics. India’s NDMA notes that from 2001–2019 cold waves caused 4,712 deaths across states - and studies show cold-related mortality remains a large, ...