In the shadows of India’s bustling capital, thousands of girls live on the streets, exposed daily to violence, exploitation, and despair. An excerpt from Harsh Mander’s recent book Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities (Yoda Press, 2026) brings their stories into sharp focus. Drawing from decades of ground-level work with homeless communities, Mander reveals how poverty, family breakdown, and systemic neglect create an environment where childhood itself becomes a casualty.
A Childhood Sold for Survival
Ten-year-old Shahida, deaf and mute, begs alongside her younger sister near Hanuman Mandir by the Yamuna Pushta. Their father’s addiction to smack drains whatever little the family scrapes together. In a heart-wrenching arrangement born of desperation, their mother has effectively handed Shahida over to an older disabled man at the temple. In exchange for daily cash that buys food for the family, the girl endures regular rape. Her silence—both literal and societal—shields the perpetrators while the family depends on her and her sister’s begging to survive another day.
Such stories are not isolated. Many girls remain tied to their families even while living on pavements or in makeshift shelters. Parents, often migrants displaced by evictions or joblessness, send daughters out to beg or rag-pick. When earnings fall short of targets—sometimes as little as ₹150 a day—beatings follow. Girls learn quickly to navigate a hostile world: swearing, fighting back against bullies, and avoiding lonely spots after dark.
The Cycle of Abuse and Addiction
As they grow older, the burdens intensify. Rag-picking may bring in slightly more money than begging, but it exposes girls to molestation, harassment, and predation by older men and street gangs. Some turn to transactional sex for quick cash or small gifts. Others run away temporarily, only to return to the same streets.
Substance abuse offers a cruel escape. Many girls chew tobacco or sniff adhesive glue bought from cycle repair shops to dull hunger and pain. This addiction often mirrors the habits of their parents—fathers lost to drugs or alcohol, mothers struggling alone after abandonment or domestic violence. Broken homes, step-relations marked by abuse, and single-parent households compound the trauma.
Families evicted from areas near the Yamuna River and relocated to distant sites like Bawana face even steeper challenges. The required down payments for tiny resettlement plots are often unaffordable, forcing people back onto pavements. Long commutes, lack of work, and crumbling support networks push more children into the workforce—and deeper vulnerability.
Aspirations Amid Hopelessness
Despite the grim reality, many of these girls cling to dreams of education. They express a fierce desire to study and build better lives. Some mothers, recognising the dangers of street life, are willing to forgo their daughters’ earnings if residential schools can take them in. However, such facilities remain limited in number and capacity. Delhi’s government initiatives for shelter homes and schools offer partial hope, but implementation gaps and insufficient scale leave thousands behind.
Broader data on Delhi’s homelessness—estimated at 200,000 to 250,000 people—underscores the gendered nature of this crisis. Women and girls face disproportionately high risks of sexual violence, police harassment, and health issues. Heat waves, inadequate sanitation, and the absence of safe shelters multiply their suffering. Anti-begging laws and forced evictions without rehabilitation further criminalise poverty rather than addressing its roots.
A Call to See and Act
Harsh Mander’s work does more than document suffering; it challenges the numbness that allows such conditions to persist in one of India’s wealthiest cities. These girls carry burdens far beyond their years—rape, repeated beatings, addiction, lost education, and stolen innocence. Their stories lay bare the failures of urban planning, social welfare, and collective conscience.
Meaningful change requires expanded residential schooling, humane resettlement policies that keep families intact, stronger child protection systems, and de-criminalisation of poverty. Until then, Delhi’s streets will continue to devour the futures of its most vulnerable children. The incalculable cost is paid not in rupees, but in shattered lives and silenced voices.
Society must choose: look away, or confront the grey smoggy skies that hide these harsh truths.
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