Who said beggars can't be choosers?

Smriti Kak Ramachandran
The Hindu
Sunday May 27, 2007


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This research was done by Prof S L Tandon under the banner of Department of Social Work.

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In Delhi, a survey has revealed that there is more to beggars than meets the eye

MORE TO IT THAN MEETS THE EYE: Even as the Capital prepares to host the Commonwealth Games-2010, there is no getting away from scenes such as this one here on Janpath. - PHOTO: SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY

NEW DELHI: Poverty, age and disability are not the only grounds for begging. At least that is what a new survey of beggars just conducted in the Capital has revealed. The surveyors even found four post-graduates supplementing their monthly salaries by going round begging over the weekends!

Conducted for the Social Welfare Department of the Delhi Government by Delhi University's Department of Social Work, the survey has thrown new light on some interesting aspects of begging and beggars.

Of over 5,000 beggars surveyed on the streets of the Capital, four turned out to be post-graduates, six graduates and 796 having studied up to the secondary level.

The survey revealed that begging attracts even those who are able-bodied and educated.

Conducted across different areas of the Capital, the survey showed that the total earnings from begging ranged from Rs. 50 to 500 a day, with most beggars opting for it in the face of little earning capacity, poverty, infirmity, destitution and age.

Of those surveyed, 799 men and 1,541 women were able-bodied but still continued with their chosen profession because they did not find alternate career options.

"Most beggars were found outside temples and other places of religious significance, where alms are given more readily. The respondents said they made more money on weekends," said an official.

"The survey," said Social Welfare Department Secretary D.S. Negi, "has indicated that most of the beggars are drug addicts and are not part of any organised gang."

Referring to the Government's proposal to make Delhi free of beggars, Mr. Negi said the Department was continually working to rehabilitate the homeless.

"We have made provisions for providing vocational training to these people in 11 homes run by the Government."

Rehabilitation

Seeking a more humane rehabilitation programme for the beggars, Head of the Department of Social Work of Delhi University Sneh Lata Tandon said: "Beggars are irked by the fact that begging is considered a crime under the Bombay Beggary Prevention Act. They complain that when they are picked up, they are arrested instead of being given an opportunity to reform."

"The Government should work out a plan for putting them into institutions where they are given vocational training depending on their requirement and handicap. Even the people who give alms need to be educated that one-time charity does not help them; instead they should be motivated to give help to institutions, which in turn empower and educate the beggars," she said.

Criminalising beggars instead of rehabilitating them

By Neeta Lal
Info Change

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A recent survey in Delhi revealed that many beggars are able-bodied and educated, forced into beggary by unemployment. The findings underscore the absence of a cohesive and humane national policy for beggars in India
If you thought penury, unemployment and disability were the only factors propelling people towards beggary, here’s some news for you. A recent survey carried out by the social welfare department (Delhi government) and Delhi University’s department of social work, reveals that the capital city’s beggars, many of them ‘educated and able-bodied’, resort to begging to augment their professional incomes! Of over 5,000 beggars surveyed, four turned out to be post-graduates who were supplementing their monthly salaries by begging on weekends, six were graduates, and 796 had studied up to higher secondary level. Conducted across a swathe of geographical regions, the survey shows that a beggar’s earnings add up to between Rs 50 and Rs 500 a day, with most beggars opting to beg in the face of meagre earning capacity, poverty, infirmity, destitution, and age. Of those surveyed, 799 men and 1,541 women were able-bodied but continued to beg due to lack of employment opportunities. Many were found to be drug addicts, but they were not part of an organised gang or mafia. Unsurprisingly, most beggars were found outside temples and places of religious significance where alms are given more readily and more generously. The respondents also said they made more money on weekends. While the survey throws some fresh light on the age-old occupation of begging, it also underscores the disquieting lack of a cohesive and humane national policy for beggars in India. Since 1961, Delhi has been administered by the antiquated Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959, which makes begging in public places a crime and a punishable offence. Clause (d) of the Act describes beggars as people “…having no visible means of subsistence and wandering about or remaining in any public place in such condition or manner (as) makes it likely that the person doing so exists by soliciting or receiving alms”. Under this Act, officials from the social welfare department (assisted by the police) conduct raids to randomly pick up beggars who are then tried in a special beggars’ court and, if convicted, sent to a certified institution. Unfortunately, however, the Begging Act lumps together an assortment of people (street performers, mendicants, small vendors, pavement-dwellers and migrants) who might solicit alms indirectly, as ‘beggars’. The Act also suffers from other serious lacunae. Firstly, it addresses anyone who appears ‘poor’ and ‘destitute’. Both definitions are nebulous and open to the vagaries of time and the whims of an inspector. Thus, a ragpicker or a migrant labourer -- who may never have begged in his/her life -- can be picked up at random and incarcerated in a beggars’ home for a period up to three years at a stretch! Secondly, the nature of the Act itself is punitive, which makes the poor criminally responsible for their position. India’s beggary laws are undoubtedly a throwback to the centuries-old European vagrancy laws that overlook the crucial difference between official text and practical reality. In other words, rather than address the socio-economic angle of beggary, beggary laws criminalise it. “The aggressive anti-beggar legislation is aimed at wiping the desperately poor off the city’s radar so that society can continue to neglect them without it pricking its collective conscience,” says senior lawyer and human rights activist Rani Jethmalani. In addition to this, the Traffic Police Notification (under the Motor Vehicles Act) provides for the imposition of a fine on motorists who give money to beggars. The Delhi Traffic Police has issued a direction to all motorists in the capital not to give alms to beggars at traffic lights, as this hinders traffic flow, sometimes even causing accidents. The fine for a first violation is Rs 150; the second time around it is Rs 300. “The law prevents motorists and commuters from doling out alms to beggars at traffic intersections, which is ludicrous as it’s unfeasible to stop them from doing so,” asserts Jethmalani. Instead of enforcing such inane laws, Jethmalani advocates the need to set in motion public awareness campaigns and vocational training for beggars depending on their capacity. “Rather than giving alms, the public should be motivated to give aid to institutions which can empower and educate the beggars,” she says. Organised begging, which often involves maiming, is widely seen as being exploitative and coercive, but there is a startling lack of documented evidence on this. The Indian Penal Code (Section 363 A) deals with the kidnapping/maiming of a minor for purposes of begging. However, the police seem intriguingly unwilling to use this, preferring to book ‘unwanted elements’ like homeless people/drug addicts in their area under the Bombay Act, as their responsibility then stops with the arrest. Thus, the current institutionalised approach to beggars merely serves to punish destitute people without aiming to help or reform them. Driven to begging, these people -- often unemployed, aged people, people with physical disabilities or drug problems -- remain helpless. Beggary laws also suffer from faulty implementation. The criteria employed by the social welfare department and the police to identify and pick up beggars are arbitrary and unfair. Mistakes abound and often those who look unkempt and miserable are rounded up despite their protests. In order to combat this legal apathy, a coalition comprising lawyers from the Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan (AAA), a campaign for the homeless in Delhi, run by ActionAid, the Human Rights Law Network and students from the law department of the University of Delhi, was set up to provide legal help to aggrieved people. In its efforts to make Delhi ‘beggar-free’, the social welfare department has been working towards rehabilitating them. The Delhi High Court too, some time ago, directed the department to clear Delhi of beggars/hawkers as they “obstruct the smooth flow of traffic”. It advocated a rehabilitation plan for them in the wake of a public interest litigation (PIL) that described beggars as the “ugly face of the nation’s capital” and as people who caused “road rage”. Under the Beggary Act, 12 statutory institutions -- 10 for male beggars and two for female beggars -- were constituted for the prevention of begging, the detention, training and employment of beggars, and the custody, trial and punishment of offenders under the law. “We’ve also made provisions for providing vocational training to beggars in these government-run homes,” explains Dr Sneh Lata Tandon, Head of the Department of Social Work, Delhi University. But despite such laudable -- albeit sporadic -- efforts to rehabilitate beggars, there’s an urgent need to revamp beggars’ homes too. Some years ago, the national media raised a storm when several beggars died of cholera at the Lampur beggar home, underscoring the horrific, near-Dickensian conditions that prevail in these homes. An inquiry was ordered into the matter and the committee’s report highlighted the need for a review of the law. “These places are called ‘homes’, but the pathetic conditions which prevail in them are worse than those of third-rate jails where ‘convicts’ may be incarcerated for up to 10 years. It’s the most sure-fire way of criminalising poverty in the country,” says social activist Jaya Pradhan. “The beggar homes feed and clothe their inmates and pay Rs 12 for an hour of constructive work,” says an official from the social welfare department. “The physically challenged and those afflicted with leprosy find beggar homes a real refuge as they are the ones who suffer the most living on the streets.” However, experts feel that such an approach is skewed because, according to official figures, the government spends approximately Rs 35,000 per head to maintain these homes. The money, experts say, could be better utilised to give beggars vocational training that can, in turn, empower them and assure them of employment. “The first step towards preventing begging is to stop giving alms. But how can people expect any effective action when begging is such a lucrative means of livelihood, allowing a person to earn up to Rs 500 a day doing nothing,” asks Supreme Court advocate Ashok Aggarwal of Social Jurists, a Delhi-based civil rights organisation. A study by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), a Delhi-based research group, pegs a beggar’s average earnings at around Rs 50 a day. According to this report, 90% of Delhi’s beggar population are migrants from the BIMARU states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. A study conducted by AAA India shows that nearly all of them were pushed to Delhi by abject poverty in their hometowns and villages. “With no sense of belonging to a place, no employment opportunities, and easy money for the asking, is it any surprise that we’ve not been able to eradicate beggary from the national landscape,” Aggarwal asks. So what really is the answer to the problem of beggary in India? The question, unfortunately, is a complex one. For starters, recognising and combating structural injustices in society and expanding livelihood options for the marginalised -- in a growth-driven and now shining trillion-dollar economy -- is a good idea. But simultaneously it is crucial to have an inclusive legal system that incorporates the welfare of the deprived/downtrodden in its charter. The problem of beggary in India needs to be addressed cohesively, involving sustained, long-term and collective action. Political will, the efforts of local administrations, NGOs and the public will all need to come together to achieve this aim. (Neeta Lal is an independent journalist based in Delhi)

Beggar’s banquet

Damayanti Datta
India Today
January 25, 2008

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See entire Research Report on Beggary

Behra tells lies. During the course of a single chat, he recounts his life story several times—in one he rescues a drowning child, in another he slaps a policeman—with the details varying so dramatically that he might be talking about totally different people.

Depending on which version you believe, Behra was born in Bihar, or in Uttar Pradesh; he is a school dropout, or never went to school; he was married twice, or never.

He may be 35, or 45. He claims to be alone in the world, but when asked if he would allow himself to be photographed, he balks: “What if my family members see me in your magazine in this condition?”

His ‘condition’ is the one certain truth about Behra: he is a beggar. A face among the nation’s over 60 lakh vagrants—the world’s largest.

Yet another disquieting presence in the midst of India ’s new plenty—indistinguishable from criminals, divorced from social systems, inhabiting hidden depths within cities.

How well does the nation know him? “Not well enough. Very few studies have been done on beggary in India,” says Sneh Lata Tandon, who heads Delhi School of Social Work (DSSW) and completed a survey on 5,003 beggars in 2007.

With the nation aspiring to world standards in conspicuous consumption, and a Commonwealth Games looming, there’s a rush to “fix this urban nuisance” now. The upshot is a rash of new surveys; and what emerges is an eye-opener on the country’s teeming underbelly.

On this bitterly cold night, Behra is not alone. He and his friends—tramps, thieves, sex workers, pimps—crowd together under the ISBT flyover in Delhi.

All thin as rakes, all united in poverty, all clutching on to whatever little they’ve got. Behra makes a bed of flattened cardboard boxes and rests his tousled head on a sack containing all his worldly possessions.

Sometimes he goes to one of the 12 beggar homes in Delhi, to get out of inclement weather or to have a doctor look at the sores on his feet. But these interludes rarely last long. Behra finds prolonged human company stressful and is deeply wary of anything that smacks of officialdom. “The shelters are okay for a bath and medical treatment,” he says, “but not for long term.”

Finding “long-term” solutions for people like Behra is an enormous—and growing—challenge for India, where vagrancy has quietly been climbing to new heights.

In a decade since 1991, their number has gone up by a lakh. There are some 60,000 beggars in Delhi, reports DSSW; over 3,00,000 in Mumbai, according to a 2004 ActionAid report; nearly 75,000 in Kolkata, says the Beggar Research Institute—the world’s only; 56,000 in Bangalore, according to police records.

In Hyderabad, one in every 354 people is engaged in begging, found out the Council of Human Welfare in 2005. In every Indian city, they are anywhere a fly could land—in rubbish dumps, at the road’s edge, on traffic islands, under flyovers. The frail, the crippled and the mentally ill share space with children, women and able-bodied men.

It’s an inferno one can easily slip into. A reality that hit the nation hard last year when Gitanjali Nagpal, a former model, was found living off the streets. The media may have given her a new lease of life, but she’s not alone. In January 2007, Prafulla Chiplunkar, an IIT engineer and the grandson of freedom fighter Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was found roaming on the streets of Pune.

A series of personal misfortunes and severe depression had pushed him to the streets. These are not one-off examples. The DSSW surveyors came across 10 graduates and postgraduates who supplement monthly income by begging over the weekends.

The line that separates beggars from the casual poor is getting slimmer in a country where one in every four goes to bed hungry every night and 78 million are homeless. Over 71 per cent (compared to just 34 per cent in 1959) of Delhi’s beggars are driven by poverty.

No wonder, 66 per cent beggars are able-bodied. “Begging as a livelihood wins over casual labour,” says Tandon. “For 96 per cent, the average daily income is Rs 80, more than what daily-wage earners can make.” Spending patterns are also telling: 27 per cent beggars spend Rs 50-Rs 100 a day.

Mumbai is the Mecca of beggars. According to the Maharashtra Government, they are worth Rs 180 crore a year, with daily income ranging between Rs 20-Rs 80. Three of the richest beggars—Haji, Massu and Bharat Jain—allegedly have assets ranging from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 70 lakh.

They earn up to Rs 200 a day and live with families where no one else begs. Jain’s family deals in school stationery, Massu’s sons are hawkers and Haji’s family earns a steady income from zari embroidery work. They beg, despite family pressure to give it up. When the Manav Sena Trust of Mumbai approached 98 beggars with jobs, all of them turned down the offers as being less remunerative.

Almost every survey profiles beggars as a largely contented lot, unwilling to take up “honest labour”. Nearly 26 per cent in the DSSW survey claimed they were “happy”.

“Do you face any problems while begging?” asked the survey team. A surprising 81 per cent said “No”, with only 15 per cent mentioning “humiliation” from the public and police. A survey done in 2004 by the Social Development Centre of Mumbai revealed similar attitude. “The majority latch on to begging as a profitable and viable profession,” says Vijay M. Karande, the secretary.

Psychiatrists, however, sketch a different portrait. A study published in the International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation by Dr Yogesh Thakker reveals that 39 per cent of the 49 beggars surveyed in Gujarat’s Baroda district by a group of medicos suffer from one or other psychiatric illness.

Nearly 74 per cent of them had a history of addiction, psychiatric illness in the family and poor attitude of family members towards them. Over 68 per cent admitted to feeling of shame and losing self-esteem, 25 per cent to guilt, 4 per cent to suicidal tendencies, 8 per cent to antisocial activities.

Reports of wealthy beggars and maiming to maximise gains—media favourites—have distorted the lens through which the nation looks at its underclass, feel people who work among them.

“Reports that the begging community is ruled by a gangland which rakes in financial gains is not wholly true,” says Indu Prakash Singh of ActionAid India, theme leader, shelter & housing. “We’re talking about people who have been raped or assaulted as children, who had bad marriages, lost loved ones, were thrown out of families, jobs or suffered other kinds of indignities.”

The story of India ’s vagrants is way too complex. There is no proper enumeration of beggars in the country. Moreover, the number of women and children is zooming. The 1931 Census mentioned just 16 per cent women beggars. The figure shot up to 49 per cent in 2001.

One among them is Kusum Devi, 45, who took to the streets after her army jawan husband died in a “war” (she doesn’t know which) and the family threw her out. “To live on the streets means beizzati (humiliation),” she says. “The policeman beats you with his baton. Any ruffian sits next to you and runs his hands over your body.”

Shelters are like prisons for beggars

• Rs 80 average daily income of beggars in metros.
• 75 per cent spend Rs 50 a day, 27% up to Rs 100.
• Most earn more than daily wage earners.
• Graduate and postgraduate beggars are increasing.
• More able-bodied beggars than disabled.
• Rs 25,000 average bank balance of beggars in Kolkata.
• 85 per cent beggars have no information about beggar homes.
• Rs 180 CR is the worth of Mumbai beggars.
• 14 per cent beggars have no expectation from the government.

She survived all that for 30 years before she was rescued by the volunteers of ActionAid. Just a little distance from Kusum Devi’s old haunt in Delhi’s Barakhamba Road, little Sapna and her cronies prance around, circus-style, with painted cheeks and drums. Sapna stays with her aunt, makes about Rs 70 a day and remits the sum to her parents—landless labourers in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh.

She belongs to India’s 10 million street children; one of Delhi’s 80 per cent vagrant children who claim, “Nobody has forced me to beg,” yet have no control over their income.

The biggest problem, however, lies in the changing attitude towards beggars.“ Traditionally, begging has been an accepted way of life in India,” says Upendra Baxi, former vice-chancellor of Delhi University and a lawyer by training. “Giving alms to the needy was built into the social fabric,” says Baxi who defended the legal rights of beggars in court during the Emergency. That changed with the colonial rule.

To the Victorians, beggary embodied laziness and moral degeneration. Colonial laws held a beggar punishable for his condition. The newly-independent nation imbibed this Anglo-Saxon attitude towards poverty. “In the new millennium, the Government doesn’t want them lying around. Middle class India regards them as a nuisance.”

“India ’s beggary laws are a throwback to the centuries-old European vagrancy laws, which instead of addressing the socio-economic issues make the poor criminally responsible for their position,” says ace lawyer, Ram Jethmalani. Consider the definition of the term ‘beggar’.

The law describes a beggar as anyone who appears ‘poor’. Depending on the whim of a police officer, a ragpicker or aconstruction labourer, who has never begged in his life, can be picked up at random and incarcerated in a beggars’ home for up to three years. “The antibeggar legislation is aimed at wiping the desperately poor off city radars so that they don’t prick our collective conscience,” he says.

Activists who routinely encounter hostility, even violence, from rough sleepers agree. “Those who have been on the streets for years get very uncomfortable when they are suddenly in a confined space,” says Atul Haksar of Karuna Welfare, a Mumbai organisation working on beggars.

Their fear turns into resentment and only a few last more than a couple of months in a shelter. “There are provisions for vocational training in the government-run beggar homes. But these are worse than the third-rate jails, where convicts may be incarcerated for up to 10 years,” he adds.

Can India fix the problem? Behra doesn’t think so. It’s two weeks since he has returned from Varanasi. Begging there was good. He shows off a bottle of cheap country liquor tucked into his sack. He’s still telling tales. But they have now taken on a darker tone with him playing the victim.

The villains, inevitably, are representatives of the state—policemen who beat him up for no reason and doctors who don’t give the medicines he needs. “Governments hurt people,” he says, recounting years of abuse he endured (or did he?) in a beggar home long ago. “The sarkar thinks short term,” he says wisely.

Finding long-term solutions for people like Behra may be the biggest hurdle on India’s road ahead. Is the nation ready to face the truth?