Source Times Online
Via Times Online
Delhi already has a posse of urban cowboys patrolling its streets to round up cattle — one of several measures imposed to sanitise the city before next year’s Commonwealth Games. Now the capital’s leaders have promised to eradicate the city’s 60,000 beggars: a mission that experts fear will victimise the most vulnerable.
Pleading for alms may be an ancient spectacle in India, but the authorities have decided to banish the sight in Delhi by October 2010 as part of a vast clean-up operation designed to drag the city into the 21st century.
Mobile courts, in the backs of vans and operated by a police task force, are being introduced to speed up convictions for begging. Officials have suggested a biometric database to identify repeat offenders so that they can be locked up or expelled from the city. Bylaws allow beggars to be sent to a special home for a year. Habitual offenders can be jailed for ten. Many beggars were expecting windfalls from the Games, the largest sporting event yet to be held in India. “More than 100,000 foreigners will be in the city,” Vijay Babli, the leader of more than 1,200 beggar families living in New Delhi’s Rohini’s Lal Quarter, told the Hindustan Times. “Even if one beggar earns 150-200 rupees per day [£2-£2.80], you can understand the turnover for us.”
Begging overlords have even set up a school where children are coached to ask in foreign languages. “Bright children are taught how to say phrases like, ‘I am an orphan, I have not eaten for days, I am ill, have no money for medicine, please help me in the name of God’,” Raju Sansi, the head of the school, said. Read Full Story
Great Idea?
To be honest I am very much skeptical about this government move to be successful. Just banning them or throwing them out of Delhi so that Delhi looks clean is not going to solve the very core issue, Poverty. Some people beg because they choose too, but most of the beggars are forced to beg.
Government should plan out a proper strategy about rehabilitating these beggars first. Condemning beggars and not treating beggars as a human being will not solve the problem. If we need clean Delhi then everybody including citizen of Delhi, Government of Delhi needs to clean their acts and mind first before cleaning the Delhi streets. We need to understand that these street beggars are also human beings.
If we just try to condemn begging or treat these beggars as human dump and garbage not as a human being then it will hard for us to understand the core issues associated with it. Without understanding the core issue associated with begging and beggars of Delhi, the move of having beggars free Delhi streets will fail in coming days.
Ekawaaz Thought: So for clean Delhi, Beggars Free Delhi We must clean our mind and soul first….and get involved so that we understand beggars issues in a better way and make out some solid plans for rehabilitation of these beggars. And make Delhi and India a better place to live…………..
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