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| Crackdown: New Delhi is now enforcing its ban on begging. raveendran/afp/getty images/newscom |
New Delhi cleanup sends in the Beggar Raid Teams
To transform itself into a 'world-class city,' India's capital is locking up panhandlers.
from the March 4, 2008 edition
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A woman stops to remonstrate with police: "How can you do this to a human being outside a holy place?"
The police wait until she has disappeared into the temple before lifting Shankar into the van, where he sits beside Paltu in silence. "Sometimes the crowd gets aggressive and we have to give up and leave," says Pandey.
A security guard at the temple, however, urges the police on. "Take them all away; they mess up the temple," he shouts, shaking his stick as the van drives away.
His attitude is perhaps more typical. While many people in the capital give money to beggars, there has been no public outcry over the move to lock them up.
Rags to riches?
On occasion, Pandey says, he has arrested beggars carrying huge sums of money. Local newspapers often print stories about the lucrative business of begging and the criminal gangs that mastermind panhandling in the capital. But the Delhi University report found that most beggars made between 50 and 100 rupees (about $1.25 and $2.50) a day.
"There may be a handful of beggars that make larger sums of money, but in our experience people are forced into begging by poverty and in poverty they remain," says Indu Prakash Singh of Actionaid, a nonprofit activist aid group that is lobbying the government to provide legal representation for arrested beggars.
Later in the journey, Pandey says he acknowledges that many of the beggars he rounds up have no choice but to beg. "But we have to work, too," he adds, "and this is our job."
Most of the men now sitting in the van seem to know begging is illegal, because they deny that this is how they live.
Not so for Mahindra, a toothless, terrified-looking man who is bundled into the van clutching a morsel of bread. "My food! My food! Give me my food," he cries, pointing at a dirty sack containing pieces of half-eaten fruit.
The old man, who says he used to work as a servant in a house in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, admits to begging every day. "I'm too old to work so this is how I survive," he tells Pandey. "I didn't know begging was an offense."
"I beg during the day and sleep in a shelter at night, otherwise they will steal my shoes," he goes on, pointing at his tattered plastic sandals.
Pandey tells him he will be given food and shelter where he is going. Mahindra nods. "But I want my freedom," he says.
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