Delhi to jail beggars for 2010 Games

Delhi to jail beggars for 2010 Games

By Mian Ridge in Delhi, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:35am BST 24/06/2007

Indian police are to launch a controversial plan to eradicate beggars and cripples from the streets of Delhi ahead of the Commonwealth Games in 2010.

Limping lepers with outstretched arms, pleading mothers pressing their naked babies to car windows, and ragged children begging for food have long been among the more infamous sights in the capital.

Now, however, uncomfortable at the way such symbols of grinding poverty jar with India's newly affluent self-image, city authorities plan to get them off the streets within a couple of years.

A government report -recommends that Delhi's -beggars be rounded up by a special police squad and placed in detention centres, tackling what it views as a serious social problem and also presenting a cleaner image of the city for the games.

The public, too, should be educated about the "evils of almsgiving, which... promotes parasites in the society and demotivates them from doing hard work", according to the report, which was written by academics at Delhi University for the city's department for social welfare.

Begging and giving alms are deeply ingrained in Indian culture. But as 2010 looms, the authorities have embarked on an intensive sprucing-up -exercise to modernise India's capital and transform it into a world-class city.

Roads, hotels and stadiums are being built; the mighty, fetid Yamuna river is being cleaned; and many of Delhi's most familiar features are being obliterated. Stalls selling freshly made food have been banned; the monkeys that roam the streets are being shut up in cages; and there are even plans to herd thousands of the city's stray holy cows into a dairy complex.

The plan to round up -Delhi's beggars and hide them away, however, is the most radical.

"The government wants to beautify Delhi and throw all the ugliness out, but this is no solution to the problem of begging," said Indu Prakash Singh, a homelessness expert with the charity Actionaid. "The only way to deal with begging is at the structural level, by tackling poverty."

Begging is already illegal in Delhi. Anyone caught begging can be arrested and taken before the beggars' court before being incarcerated in one of 12 beggars' homes, which are more like jails than homeless hostels.

At present, the law is under-used. Delhi's beggars' homes have room for 3,600 inmates, but just 1,400 are held in them. Many more will have to be built if the beggars are to be out of sight before 2010, judging by the survey on which the report is based - the biggest to be undertaken on the problem.

About 58,570 beggars - a third of whom were children - were counted throughout Delhi's 134 wards, and 5,003 of them were interviewed in depth.

Nearly half of the adults interviewed collected between 50 and 100 rupees a day (62p-£1.24), not much less than the daily wage of a labourer. Three per cent said they made between 100 and 500 rupees a day.

Almost all the beggars interviewed were illiterate and without skills. Most had come to Delhi from other regions of India - especially the impoverished states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh - and had turned to begging because they could not find work.

Ramayan Mallik, a leper in a wheelchair whose arms stop at the elbows, left his home in Orissa, eastern India, 10 years ago. Wheeling himself into position outside the Sai Baba Temple near Lodhi Road, he said that this was the best place in Delhi to beg, and the most lucrative day was Thursday, when the street throngs with pilgrims.

Mallik makes between 30 and 50 rupees a day, some of which he saves up to send back to his family.

At mention of the plan to eradicate begging in Delhi, he looked bewildered.

"People like to give a little to the poor," he said, as a woman in a crimson silk sari sashayed out of the temple, and, without looking at him, threw four rupees into his lap.