Professional panhandling : Getting beggars off the streets an uphill task

Despite arrests, vagrants roam in twin cities to meet their daily earning targets

RAWALPINDI:

Aided by lenient laws and looking to make easy money, professional beggars are a nuisance whose curtailment in the twin cities is a distant reality with no concrete solution in sight.

Wearing tattered clothes, alms seekers mark their territories early in the morning, which often leads to quarrels if another beggar violates said territory. The popular territories being the twin cities’ busy traffic signals, with the choked traffic giving them access to numerous people, followed by busy shopping centers, where asking for money is not hindered by nightfall.

Treating begging as a daily wage job whether rain or shine, alms seeking as a profession does not discriminate with children, women, men, and amputees of all ages opting to beg to run their households.

The scope of it is such that Rawalpindi police sources familiar with the matter state that 20 to 30 beggars are caught per day. However, nearly all of them walk away scot-free. Farid Satti, who roams the streets of Islamabad’s twin city asking for money and was just released from jail, said that he has no other profession to turn to.

“I am disabled and cannot work. If anyone gets me a good job, I will stop begging,” he said matter-of-factly. Similarly, Arsalan, only in his pre-teens, said that there was no other option besides begging. “My father has died and I have an ailing mother and a younger sister. I am forced to beg because I neither have a job nor any relatives to support me,” he lamented. While Arsalan has been lucky to avoid any brush up with the law, according to the Deputy Director of the Child Protection Bureau, Abid Naqvi, minors are regularly taken into custody for begging.

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“At present, there are 80 children in the bureau, who we are taking care of,” Naqvi said “However, parents who serve an affidavit in the Child Protection Court assuring that their child will not beg in the future have to be let go.”

It is not only the children who are let go. Deputy Superintendent of Police, Raja Fayyaz, told The Express Tribune, that in the previous year 1,200 beggars were taken into custody.

“We arrest professional beggars on a daily basis but the offense is bailable so they are let go,” he said. Fayyaz was of the view that if the law on begging is tightened and there is no right to immediate bail, it could have fruitful consequences.

However, Sardar Abdul Raziq, a lawyer, disagrees with Fayyaz’s views, stating that the solution to stopping begging lay in the eradication of poverty and the state strengthening its system of Baitul Maal or Zakat. “Begging is not a serious crime but a moral evil hence its punishment should not be increased. Besides, making begging a non-bailable offense would be a violation of basic human rights,” Raziq told The Express Tribune.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2022.