Why Does India Has So Many Beggars?
As you stop your car at a traffic light, you immediately see a dirty-looking mother with a child in her arm run over to you, a little youngster with a runny nose beating on your car window, or an elderly guy with a disability begging for alms. In India, this is a regular sight.
Many of these individuals may be found around train stations, metro stations, tourist attractions, temples, and other places where there is a regular audience. Sometimes we tend to offer them some coins or money and shoo them away out of pure sympathy, out of fear of receiving punishment from God, or out of annoyance.
One of the most important societal problems in India is begging. India is a country that is driven by poverty despite its tremendous economic expansion, which is also fueling the country’s rise in beggars. Some of them are from India, but most of them are from Bangladesh.
There are few beggars in the country who genuinely are the true ones, who beg because they are crippled, because of their incapacity to work or because they are old or blind, or because they really need money for fundamental requirements. Many other people choose to beg to obtain a living because they are much below the poverty level.
In certain instances, we discover that the whole family is engaged in begging. Every family member begs on the streets or in temples as the number of family members grows due to marriage and birth. Those households’ children do not attend school; instead, they only beg.
Because their family’s income is insufficient to feed everyone in a day, they are forced to engage in begging. Here, poverty is a major contributing factor to the predicament. Yet simultaneously, the answer to this problem is not to beg.
Yet poverty is only one aspect of the narrative. India has a true poverty problem, but not begging. In India, begging has grown to be a significant business. For many people, begging is just another form of employment. People go out to beg instead of working for money. In places like Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Kolkata, etc., there are beggar gangs. Each of these groups has a gang boss.
Each leader assigns a certain area for a band of beggars, and the day’s proceeds are divided among them. The bigger portion belongs to the gang boss. These begging people are too committed to begging to desire other jobs. It’s odd, but true, because some of these beggars make hundreds or even millions of dollars annually—much more than the average middle-class employee.
Why Does India Has So Many Beggars?
The beggars are taught to beg with such tenacity that you will have to give them money. This is particularly true for foreigners who don’t know how to respond in such circumstances and end up giving beggars money. Some of the teenage panhandlers end up as anti-social citizens of the nation. They take up drug use. Begging is where they start when they want to acquire drugs, followed by pickpocketing and larger con games like robbery and murdering.
In India, begging has significantly increased. According to estimates, there are 500,000 beggars in India. Begging has allegedly been outlawed via the implementation of several measures, according to the government, various groups, and campaigners, with some amount of effectiveness.
Yet, the practice of begging still prevails. We are also at fault. We Indians are highly traditional, fear God and have a religious mindset. This forces us to perform acts of kindness. Visit a neighboring temple and donate donations to the beggars there is another simple solution.
But, it is our moral obligation as residents of this nation to put an end to this threat, and the only way to do so is to cease offering alms. Even though it could appear that we are being callous by refusing to give money to a little child begging on the street, this is one action we can do to stop it. Beggary will eventually be eradicated from our country if more and more individuals publicly declare that they will not give anything to any beggar, regardless of their need. Let the government continue its efforts to reduce poverty in the interim and improve living conditions in India.
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