essay on Begging in India

Begging is always a crime—whether it is begging for freedom, begging for jobs or begging for money. The beggar is the man who has acknowledged defeat at the hands of destiny in the struggle for existence. He is a weakling and a coward. He deserves not pity but contempt. In time, we realised the futility of the begging attitude and learnt that by struggle alone we could obtain freedom.
Our begging for service is met with like contempt by a employer. We are made to feel that governments must be forced to solve unemployment under active pressure. And when we treat the beggar in the street in the same spirit of contempt, it will also cure him of the habit of begging and utter reliance on others.
Of course, all this refers to the able-bodied beggars, who demand alms in the name of religion or God. It was an evil day for our country when begging implies religious salvation. No man has a right to beg who has the ability to earn his livelihood by the sweat of his brow.


But there is another class of beggars who stand on a different footing. These are the disabled, the deformed and the diseased. Being by birth or accident handicapped, they beg for their living.; but in many cases they are forced to beg on behalf of a band of the most cruel and heartless employers who make capital out of their misfortune.
In England, there are Poor Law institutions maintained by the community. Those who are rendered unfit for work and have none to support, are removed to the charitable institutions like the Parish houses generally attached to the church and kept there as a charge on society. There are also vagrancy law6 that make begging by the able-bodied a punishable crime. The State looks after them in homes maintained for the purpose. In socialist countries, the disabled are guaranteed pensions by the State.

In our country, however, the problem is always before the public, urgently demanding a solution. On every public thoroughfare, at the steps of every restaurant, the gates of every temple—all are crowded with beggars. Familiarity with the sight of the diseased and the maimed has dulled our human sensibility and paralysed our con­science. We just look at them and pass on a small piece of coin into an outstretched palm. We forget that the diseased are very often a social menace and should be prevented from spreading contagion by rounding them up as the disabled and the deformed are a social scourge. The work should be taken up by municipalities and district Panchaeyts and proper funds should be created for their maintenance. The rich who live in plenty must come to the help of their unfortunate brethren in slums and hovels.

The problem of the able-bodied beggars, however, is vexatious. There are two classes of them. One class consists of the genuine poor who beg because they cannot find employment. Governments in the West can stop them from begging, because they accept partial responsibility for feeding them. But here our governments have no such responsibility and legislation against these is impossible because of religious taboo.
But the class of religious mendicants present a ticklish problem. We hardly know how to deal with them. We must examine how far it is possible to bring them under religious organizations,—religious trusts managed by the temples and mosques and churches. Let funds be collected from those whose religious sense detest (hate) the parasites and let charity be distributed by them. But the humiliating habit of begging from door to door must not be encouraged.
And that reminds us of an another class of mendicants who were once led by that Prince of Beggars, Mahatma Gandhi. They beg for hospitals, for orphanages, for charitable institutions. They haunt the streets, they invade the trams, they greet you in your office with a donation book or collection box; they are everywhere with their mute appeal on behalf not of themselves, but of the suffering humanity. They rouse the social conscience. Let us open our hearts and our purse strings to them generously.