Last week, an irregular subject flickered across the front page news, amidst serious matters like the Pegasus surveillance, the increase of Covid cases, and the continued farmers’ protests outside Delhi: beggars. In response to a petition that sought to “restrain beggars and vagabonds/homeless from begging on (sic) traffic junctions, markets and public places to avoid the spread of Covid-19 pandemic in all the States and Union Territories across India,” the Supreme Court demurred, saying that it was “a socio-economic issue,” and that “a large number of people, including children, are compelled to be on the streets to beg due to the absence of education and employment.”
The Supreme Court’s sensitivity joins forces with a small group of legal activists who have long struggled for the repeal of the anti-beggary laws in the country which criminalise beggary. Under these laws, which derive from the laws the British put in place in colonial India like they had done in England, the police can arrest anyone they take to be beggars and put them in a government-run shelter for beggars. In contrast to the rich moral deliberations on the importance of giving alms in different religious traditions, these laws preferred to regard beggars as being wasteful and economically non-productive and punish them.
Apart from asking that the freedom and dignity of beggars be respected by the law enforcers, activists have also proposed that the government devise rehabilitative measures for them. Drafted in consideration of these demands, The Persons in Destitution (Protection, Care and Rehabilitation) Model Bill of 2016, which decriminalises begging and proposes to view the issue within a rehabilitative framework, though, appears to have gone into cold storage.
Beggars are a common enough sight in Indian towns and cities, but their social fate matters little to the rest. While cities are celebrated in modern thought as places that extend the pleasures of anonymity to individuals, they also render the powerless invisible. Except as a setting for an occasional cinematic episode or when a scandal breaks out, like the deaths of twenty beggars in the Beggar’s Colony in Bengaluru a decade ago, beggars don’t surface in the dominant media representations.
The ceaseless media chatter about economic growth and development has dispensed with the need for social concern about those at the bottom of society. Indeed, when growth and development are seen as indispensable and non-negotiable, managing social problems through welfare measures seems the only way of showing policy sensitivity. But that would be to treat the symptom, and not the cause itself.
Current models of economic growth are actively eroding the livelihoods of lakhs of people following traditional occupations and displacing them from agricultural and tribal villages. Economic development models in India have disrupted the family and community support systems that usually shield people from falling into destitution.
It is no surprise that modern beggary is found mostly in urban areas where social support mechanisms of the kind seen in rural areas, where survival is not a wholly monetised affair, are not found. Indeed, even in cities, family and community support networks offer help to those experiencing social distress in ways that are hard to find in Western countries. If there is no visible unrest on Indian streets despite high levels of job loss and financial hardship, the answer will partly lie in the existing systems of social support that the affected individuals can lean on.
In what appears as an undercount, the 2011 census put the total number of beggars in the country at over 4 lakhs. This figure at any rate is likely to go up if the current economic policies continue to be urban-centric and pro-modern industry and injure the livelihoods of people following traditional occupations.
While the means of the proper rehabilitation of beggars and other destitute people should engage the creative imagination of policy makers, and every attempt made to crack down on the organised beggary mafias whose cruel realities formed the subject of Brecht’s powerful play, The Three Penny Opera, finding substitutes for the socially destructive models of economic growth in our midst appears a crucial task alongside.