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| Issue 07 |
February 2006 |
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I’ve always wondered how miserably street-dwellers live in India. They may be making a lot of money through begging, but as you all might know, all beggars have a head, a pimp who takes his share of money to allow them to beg. The pimp also makes sure that the children of the poor beg or else they will mutilate them physically (by cutting off their arm or leg, or burning them, as you can see in grown up beggars) so that they are forced to beg. The only thing that comes to mind to most people is that they give them money. Giving the beggars money will not make them educated, and implicitly, rich. The only option is to educate them. But how does a single person driving down the streets do that? How do you bring about a change in the condition of the poor? Indian society is also bogged down with the feelings that helping the poor by giving them in kind would get them their blessings and wash of their sins! But as I explained, that doesn’t help the poor stand up for making their own living with dignity. It’s been some time now that the government passed the law to fine people paying the beggars. But it is not implemented by the police as they know that the beggars don’t have any other source of income, and I am also sure that they would be taking some “hafta” from them to allow them to remain on the streets. The government itself is corrupt and as Cris explained, “is so stupid that it is stealing from the poor instead of the rich”. I also know of big NGO’s like SOS village to which people donate clothes, and where the huge piles of clothes keeps on getting collected with no satisfaction to the donator that it would ultimately go to someone who really needs it. Moreover, even when someone poor does get it, I believe that they do not care for it as much as I at least would do, as they do not know it’s value since they are not educated. The question I put forward again is that how do we help the street dwellers and more importantly to stop them from begging? What I propose is that we should make the beggars work for a positive sum game. We see so many people selling trinkets, small toys, books, magazines, and newspapers on the streets. But do we ever buy those trinkets? And do we ever buy those books or magazines unless we really need them? What I recommend is that whenever we have the purchasing power, while driving out on the streets, we should buy a whole bunch of their stuff. This would make the beggars realize that selling stuff is more profitable, and would make them switch to selling stuff and free them of the pimps they are bound to. (Of course we all know that beggars earn a lot of money, which they can invest for starting the business.) Once they start selling stuff, they would also start getting educated about the business and the ways of going about the process of earning through dignity. To make the process a positive sum game, we should also benefit out of our purchase. We should then try to sell the stuff, for minimal profit equivalent to the time and money we have spent, on sites like ebay, stating that it is for the benefit of the poor. Whatever stuff is not sold out can be donated to some NGO with a statement of proof that it was given for someone poor who really needed the stuff. The beggars switch to selling stuff and living with dignity. We gain some monetary profit out of it along with emotional satisfaction of trying to do the least we can do to make the conditions of the poor better.
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Centre
for Civil Society |
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