Indore: A team of municipal workers from Indore have been caught on video dumping old homeless people by the side of a highway on the outskirts of the city.
According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Indore is India’s cleanest city for four consecutive years.
The video that has been shot by locals and widely shared on the Internet shows the municipal truck and workers trying to unload homeless people.
The locals opposed the act and forced the workers to take back the homeless people and not just leave them in the freezing cold.
Disturbing visuals show old people who are not even fit enough to sit on their own being dropped off by the side of the road. Another video shows a man explaining how the municipal workers brought the homeless people in a truck and abandoned them, throwing their belongings on the road.
Abhay Rajangaonkar, the Indore Municipal Corporation’s Additional Commissioner told ANI, “We have established Rain Baseras (shelters) for the homeless and will probe into why these elderly people were not sent there. We have also sacked two contractual employees in this connection.”
The incident had received a lot of criticism from the public as well as political parties.
“In the name of cleanliness the officials of the Indore Municipal Corporation left the elderly in the cold. Now what should the poor officials do… they are working according to the ideology of the BJP? As the BJP left many elderly leaders… like Advaniji, Joshiji, Yashwant Sinha,” Congress spokesperson Narendra Saluja told NDTV.
Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan has ordered action against the men in the video. Two municipal workers have been sacked and the Deputy Commissioner of Indore Municipal Corporation has been suspended.