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Bangalore melts to begging bowls

The alms that you pay to these kids and assume that it might help them is actually going to be pocketed by a Fagin-like monster sitting in some corner of a slum in one or the other part of the city.

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Stop at any of the junctions on MG Road for the lights to turn ‘green’, and your eyes will not miss little children, lifting themselves up on their toes trying to catch the attention of occupants inside cars. A tiny hand is thrust forward, palm facing upwards, and one realises they are actually begging for alms.

Little children! One’s heart melts at the sight, and the hand tries to fish out some coins.

If you think you are about to exhibit an act of kindness, riding on that emotional moment, then please note - you are about to be taken for a ride. The money that you assume might help these kids is actually going to be pocketed by a Fagin-like monster sitting in some corner of a slum in one or the other part of the city.

You have just had a brush with one of the most forms of mafia active in Bangalore. You have also just met the softest part -in the form of these little children - of the dreaded beggary mafia, which feasts on the very soul of human beings. You have just as well met the Oliver Twists in their worst avatars too.

If this shocks you, read on, there is more.

According to Anitha Kanaiya, executive director, Oasis India, an NGO working for the welfare of children, an investigation revealed that a gang from Andhra Pradesh (just one among many such including from other states) is active in ‘supplying’ children for begging. “And the beggary mafia and human trafficking mafia are interlinked,” she points out.

Poor parents, believe it or not, often encourage their children to beg on the streets as they consider it easy and lucrative (on an average, a child can earn around Rs200 per day), but they do not realise that their children, often teenagers, are also trafficked for the flesh trade by the lords of the beggary rings.

Moreover, in many cases, this happens with the blessings of the very parents of these children, who, are mostly migrants who come to the city in search of a livelihood but find themselves on the streets .

How the beggary mafia works
The migrants who find themselves on the streets, sell toys and other petty items at junctions. While the older members of the families simply sell wares, their children are often targeted by middlemen who lure parents into forcing their children to beg.
Falling for the dream of lucrative earnings, as assured by middlemen, parents force their children, as well as aged family members, to beg.

The middlemen - well-connected with the beggary ganglords - make a lot of money by providing the children to the begging squads, each of which, in turn, pays Rs50-100 per child per day to the middleman who also gets Rs300 for each elderly beggar and pregnant beggar ‘supplied’ to them.

The begging gangs then do the rest - disfiguring the children and the aged often by using dubious medicines and bandages, cutting off parts of limbs, partial blinding and other cruel acts; all attempts to attract sympathy.

A study conducted by CWC reveals that each child earns over Rs100 a day while the aged beggars can earn sums in the range of Rs300-500.

CWC members say pregnant women and old women are the best bets for the beggary mafia, as more often than not, people’s sympathies are netted by these, and the alms flow freely to them. In many cases, babies, a few-months-old, are handed to them for added effect.

The babies are often exchanged among different families and are also found drugged to make them sleep. If drugging is not needed in case of months-old babies, the women are instructed to keep pinching them so that they wail out in pain. The objective, of course, is to tug at the heart strings of people.

These families, directed by the beggary mafia, come in groups and have their ‘territories’ marked among themselves. They also as communicate with each other in a coded form, even alerting each other in case of an impending police raid, says a CWC staff member.

Inquiries with NGOs and CWC reveal that there are innumerable gangs - mostly not even assessed - operating in the city. Each gang may have anywhere between 50 and 200 beggars in all age-groups. But it is the children, pregnant women and old women (in some cases even old men with debilitating physical disabilities) who are pressed into service. The beggary rings which constitute the mafia consider these groups to be highly active in terms of attracting sympathy from a soft-hearted society.

The authorities have so far failed in estimating the amount of money that is circulating within the big, bad world of begging in the city, but their guess is that it runs in multiples of crores. Worse, the beggary mafia has several tentacles in the form of influential politicians, powerful policemen and even the underworld - the last, which spreads across metros and whose palms are heftily greased for the nefarious business to run.

 

Helpless authorities
“Considering the ever-growing mafia involved in this, we decided to file a case, but we could not do it due to various technical reasons,” reveals executive director of BOSCO, a city based NGO, Fr PS George.

The ‘technical reasons’ are these: since the poor families get money and a promise of employment for their children, they readily agree to send their wards into begging. In case the children or their relatives are apprehended by the police and sent to Beggars’ Colony, they get them released. And then they are back on the streets, doing exactly the same thing for which they were sent to Beggars’ home, in the first place.

A special police squad led by Joint Commissioner of Police (West), Pranob Mohanty, recently conducted simultaneous raids in different parts of the city and rescued over 240 children. But a majority of these children are now back on the streets due to the absence of rehabilitation programmes.

Along with the police, officials of women and child development and social welfare departments, Child Welfare Committee (CWC), Child Helpline and Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), too, participated in the raid, apart from NGOs.

Another special drive, carried out by the city police, with the department of women and child development last December, too, proved to be an abject failure despite rescuing around 200 children across the city.

As per the plan, it was decided to rehabilitate the rescued children by giving them education and shelter, but as per the Juvenile Justice Act, the authorities have no right to retain the children, who should be handed over to their parents.

The parents had them released and pushed them right back into the business; that too, after giving an undertaking that they would not do so.

Although there is a provision to follow up on the family which takes back the children, it could not been done due to shortage of staff. Moreover, even if there were adequate personnel with the Child Welfare Committee, they found that hundreds of parents who took back their children had given fake certificates and false residential addresses which made it difficult to carry out a check, CWC officials say.

What the police and the NGOs realised was that begging is an organized scam supported by the parents and relatives of the beggars. But their shrewdness in taking advantage in the loopholes in the law is derived from the dominant mafia dons who are connected with a very shrewd battery of lawyers and advocates.

For the time being, however, the police, the NGOs and members of CWC believe that awareness among public (to encourage them to report a large number of children accompanied by just one or two adults), has reduced incidents of children being brought in for begging from other states.

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