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FLORISHING 'BEGGING INDUSTRY' OF INDIA
By M H AHSAN
In a country of myriad social and economic mixes, this is one more. Some say it pays to be a beggar in India. It represents an estimated Rs2 billion (about US$50 million) business in the commercial hub Mumbai. Begging is estimated to be a Rs1.5 billion industry in Delhi, employing 50,000 people.
Most beggars originate from the more than 200 million Indians who continue to live under impoverished conditions, surviving on less than $1 a day. Benefits of growth have trickled down, with more than 200 million crossing the poverty line in the past two decades, but there is a huge mass yet untouched.
Innumerable visitors to India, when they return home, carry back images of beggars knocking desperately on their car windows or pestering them at tourist locations.
Though there is a very dark side to begging in India, of exploitation of children and forced amputations, the organized aspects of the begging business have also come to the fore.
Some have been more than lucky. Recently, the media carried the story of a female beggar named Sarvatia Devi from the impoverished state of Bihar, who pays an annual insurance premium of Rs36,000 ($800), a princely sum for many. She has money stashed away in bank accounts. The report said Sarvatia has traveled across the country and has even been on a pilgrimage to many holy places.
"It's fun traveling on trains free of cost. I board any train and beg till I reach my destination," she said.
Sarvatia's case is similar to those of some Mumbai bargirls who have amassed huge wealth from the largesse extended by their very rich clients. The scale of earnings of some bargirls who inhabited the dance bars that have been banned now is, of course, much more.
But the begging business model is sound. Indians are known to be in a very generous mood during holy occasions such as festivals or temple visits, celebrations such as marriages or success in jobs or exams. Families have followed the tradition of giving away alms to the poor for generations. Beggars, like cows, are tolerated on Indian roads as many consider it their religious duty (dharma) to give away alms.
Some beggars have had it better than others. There have been several instances of beggars fighting cases in courts by hiring lawyers to defend their right to beg after being picked up by the police. A beggar found dead on the roadside in Mumbai had hundreds of thousands of rupees stashed away under the mattress on which he died.
Film director Madhur Bhandrakar, known for entertaining yet meaningful cinema, spent more than a year researching the subject of begging in Mumbai that resulted in the recent movie Traffic Signal.
Bhandrakar portrays beggars as human beings with emotions and attachments, but ends up preaching the status quo rather than finding a way out the morass for the people involved. However, the film does illuminate quite a bit of the back-channel systems that run the show. It is a deep-rooted mafia, involving politicians, municipal authorities, police and the underworld, that charges protection money from each beggar and ensures that the business keeps running.
The film, however, only fleetingly looks at the several allegations of criminal gangs resorting to amputation of body parts of adults or crippling children so that they generate more sympathy and can make more money.
As with any other vocation, there are beggars who make it and others who don't. Thus the half-naked fakir watches movies in multiplexes with his girlfriend while not working as a beggar; the desperately pregnant woman's clothing is filled up with pillows; the seemingly dead person on the road is actually alive.
The basic principle on which the begging works is a very deep-seated belief among many Indians that their sorrow can end or happiness could continue if they help the poor. It's a very noble principle except that ideally the alms should be channeled via more organized forums rather than car windows or thrown at a poor soul on the sidewalk. It is in essence a wasteful industry centered on a parasitic existence and exploiting the poor.
Recently, noting the failure of the Delhi government and the police to curb begging in public, a court directed both to place beggars in detention houses and train them in vocational trades. The police also have to investigate whether "organized begging" is run by an inter-state mafia. Police officials say they are quite helpless against permanently rounding up beggars because of legal and cultural issues that look at begging as a social rather than criminal problem.
A recent study conducted by a prominent non-governmental organization and the Institute of Human Behavior and Allied Sciences, one of India's leading mental hospitals, revealed that 77.6% of homeless women were 16-45 years old. While more than half of the women (52.2%) surveyed were selling small items on footpaths to earn a livelihood, 18.4% were doing odd jobs as construction workers and contract laborers. Another 18.5% were beggars. Significantly, 98% reported sexual harassment.
Indian social activists could perhaps follow the example of Bangladesh's 2006 Nobel Prize Laureate Mohammed Yunus, who has included the category of beggars in his massive microcredit program. Beggars are provided loans to procure items such as toys, food or stationary items, a process that allows them ultimately to move up the economic and social ladder. Many have managed to set up their own small businesses, such as retail shops.
Indeed, begging is only one aspect of dark elements trying to take advantage of the acute poverty in India. Despite a ban on the human-organ trade, there is a ruthless machinery that is involved in multimillion-dollar exercises that prey on the poor desperate for money. Many times organs are removed even without the knowledge of the victim, who might have been admitted to a hospital for some other ailment. As Indians are very reluctant voluntary donors, the southern state of Tamil Nadu has attained notoriety for scandals involving illegal removal of kidneys.
India continues to be a story of vast contrasts. According to government figures, a new category of the rural rich has emerged creating a divide within the rural economy, as opposed to just a rural-urban income disparity. Thus the rural rich are 1,000 times as likely as rural poor to own a motorcycle, 100 times as likely to own a color television, and 25 times as likely to own a pressure cooker.
The rural-rich market is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion. Investors looking at India as a market composed of 300 million middle-class households, many employed in the services sector that contributes more than 50% of the gross domestic product, could do well to add another 100 million, at least, residing (or with a base) in rural locations.
However, beggars on the streets of India are one more stark reminder of the distance that has yet to be covered.
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