Delhi authorities launched their first mobile courts on Tuesday, which will begin convicting beggars as part of a strategy to clean up the city ahead of the Commonwealth Games, officials said.
The four courts supported by a police control room are intended to speed up convictions of beggars who city authorities worry could bother foreign visitors during the sporting event next year.
”Today is the inaugural day,” RP Kukreti, a senior official in the Department of Social Welfare, told Agence France-Presse. ”They [beggars] will be apprehended on the spot by mobile courts.”
Court proceedings will be conducted in minibuses which will be driven around the city, he added.
Beggars are a common sight at traffic lights and frequently tap on car windows and cluster at tourist spots, asking residents and foreigners for loose change.
The deputy director of the Department of Social Welfare, PC Sharma, told Agence France-Presse that convicted beggars would be sent to a rehabilitation centre for a maximum of three years.
”The purpose is to make them more skill-oriented and to rehabilitate them and then repatriate them to their respective state,” he said, adding that 90% of beggars in Delhi were from elsewhere in the country.
Some charity groups, including the Save Children Campaign, an Indian NGO, have condemned the crackdown on begging, saying it does not solve the underlying problem of poverty.
Lalu, a 51-year-old beggar at an underpass in south Delhi, said he doubted that the police would be able to round up the tens and thousands of beggars in the city.
”There are too many of us. The police don’t bother with me because I have no money to bribe them,” he said.
The courts are part of an effort by civic authorities to turn the capital of 16-million people into a ”world-class city”.
In seeking to beautify Delhi, thousands of slum dwellings have already been demolished as new sport and transport infrastructure springs up in preparation for the games.
A recent government report leaked to the local press suggested, however, that work on 14 of the 19 sports venues is running late, while nine transport projects to improve Delhi’s congested road network are at ”high risk” of not being completed when the Games open on October 3 next year. — AFP
