Urban homeless people constitute the most marginalized and invisiblised category even within the urban poor. Estimates of their numbers globally range from anywhere between 100 million and one billion of the global population.

This very broad range of estimates is the consequence of the existence of many variant definitions of what constitutes a ‘homeless’ person – a person with no shelter whatsoever; one with shelter that is very insecure (for example, squatter settlements); one with shelter that is temporary (including pavement dwellers and refugee camps). In this paper, we include within the category of homeless people those who have no shelter at all, sleeping on pavements, railway stations and bus stands, pipes, under staircases, in shop corridors, or in night shelters or welfare institutions. Those with makeshift structures like a plastic sheet on a pavement are the precariously housed.