By Sudeshna Banerjee
Indo-Asian News ServiceNovember 19, 2002
When 16-year-old Manoj recited his poem "Kangalistan ke kangle hum sab... (We are the beggars of this beggar nation)", all his listeners sympathised. But that was where the meeting of minds at a workshop in the Indian capital on the problems impoverished beggars face, and pose, ended. The authorities and NGOs had totally different views on tackling the situation.
Activists flayed the police for outlawing begging at traffic intersections, but the authorities insisted the move was important not just to ensure the smooth flow of vehicles but to break the backs of criminal gangs behind the beggar network.
There are no new estimates of how many people in India, specifically this city of 15 million people, live off begging. The last figure was released in 1983, when a professor in Delhi University's Law Faculty estimated there were 1.01 million beggars in the country.
NGO representatives at the workshop said beggars were a distressed lot, compelled to migrate to this city from other states in search of a living. Said Sanjay Gupta, an activist with Childhood Enhancement through Training and Action (Chetna): "Begging is one of the responses of acute poverty. People are not born beggars and do not become so by taking alms, but are victims of lack of employment opportunities in rural and urban areas. "They are often incapable of working because of old age and physical handicap. Before beginning to solve this problem with strict anti-poverty laws, the government should modify its policies and schemes."
Added Indu Prakash Singh, the director of Ashray Adhikaar Abhiyan that has been fighting for the rights of beggars: "A study by the Centre for Media Studies (a Delhi-based research group) pegs a beggar's average earnings at about Rs 50 a day on the basis of statements of over 60 percent of beggars interviewed.
"Do not call them beggars -- they are distressed people. Decriminalising begging will help in addressing the root cause. People do not beg out of choice, but out of compulsion." Singh claimed the police belief that beggars on Delhi streets were puppets in the hands of crime syndicates was unfounded.
"A recent study by Delhi policeman Prakash Srivastava totally denied any role of the mafia operating behind begging in Delhi. How can the government say it is an organised crime?"
But Maxwell Pereira, the joint commissioner of police in charge of traffic, said: "There are several active gangs operating in Delhi. It has come to our notice that 500 people are brought in every year into Delhi from outside for this purpose."
NGOs were up in arms earlier this year when the traffic police announced that motorists and commuters giving alms to beggars or buying goods from vendors at traffic intersections would be fined.
B B Pande, the law professor who had conducted the 1983 survey on beggars, said as many as seven criminal gangs organised begging in this city.
Another point of criticism at the workshop was the situation arising from the extension of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA) to Delhi. Under the law, begging, vending on roads, cleaning vehicles at traffic junctions, singing in buses and displaying disability for alms are all unlawful.
Anybody penalised under this law is sent to a special beggar court and bailed out only after paying between Rs 500 and Rs 1,000. Both activists and NGOs agreed this was doing little good. "In spite of the law, only two percent of the people caught are convicted in Delhi. Do we need such a rule?" asked K J R Burman, joint director of the social welfare department.
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