A city that cares?

The Megapolis and Western Development Ministry has decided to prohibit begging from 1 January 2018. The plan, as far as plans go in Sri Lanka, is to round up beggars and rehabilitate them in a new facility built at a cost of Rs. 80 million. But in its efforts to beautify the city the Government cannot ignore the plight of the destitute and it must understand that it should not criminalise being poor. 

Megapolis Minister Champika Ranawaka has ambitious plans to rehabilitate beggars by providing them with alternative livelihoods and educating children who beg. But the social roots of begging cannot be easily fixed, as many Governments around the world have discovered. Even if some of them are rehabilitated, others simply filter into that space, because the underlying issue of poverty and disempowerment cannot be universally resolved.  

From time to time, governments declare war on beggars. These despised and dispensable individuals, who live customarily by alms, can never hope to win a battle against such a powerful adversary as the State. 

The war on beggars is engined by enormous middle class hostility to the begrimed men, women and children in rags, often with matted hair, disabilities and sores, who stretch out their palms peremptorily demanding charity. The middle class resent the way these illegitimate denizens crowd decent public spaces like cinemas, traffic light intersections, shopping arcades and places of worship, wheedling them annoyingly for alms. 

They are embarrassed by their “in-the-face” poverty, and convinced that they are lazy, and unwilling to earn an honest day’s work. They are the “undeserving poor”, who must be driven away or locked up for the larger benefit of decent, law-abiding citizens. In these beliefs, they are supported by the law, police, courts, welfare departments and the media.

The criminalising of begging is a relatively recent colonial construction. Traditional societies have been much more tolerant of people who live by begging, and some traditions like Buddhism in fact valorise begging by holy men because it is believed to teach them humility, and enables them to break away from all forms of material bondage. It was in the 1920s that begging was first declared a crime in British India, and later adopted by other states and countries in South Asia. 

Beggars in Colombo are simply a reflection of what Sri Lanka is, a lower-middle income country that has its share of people who are failed by the social network, the welfare system and the greater economy. Beggars are found in the richest capitals of the world, as well as the poorest, and this is a reflection of the imperfect social system we all belong to. The poor are not criminals and devoid of their rights simply because they are poor, and surely a society that wishes to see itself as progressive, inclusive, and championing of sustainable development cannot back the removal of beggars simply because of mild discomfort.  

Poor people have as much right to exist in a capital as their richer counterparts and removing them simply because they are poor is actually a damning example of intolerance, inequality and even inhumanity. Colombo supposedly aspires to be the “hub” of South Asia; perhaps a better start would be as a capital that cares.