"Inside a tiny courtroom buzzing with flies, a police officer stands before a judge and carefully unfolds a white handkerchief. The damning evidence inside: 13 coins worth about 30 cents. He says he found them in the pockets of Shanni Ram Ganga, a hunched man standing next to him facing a sentence of one to three years. Ganga's alleged crime: begging. Beggars crowd every sidewalk in India, yet panhandling is illegal, so a separate judicial system exists just for those accused of pleading for coins in public. More than 1,400 people are serving sentences in beggars' homes — rundown facilities often little better than prisons, critics say — and that number is expected to rise as the government "cleans up" the Indian capital to host the Commonwealth Games, a major sports competition, in 2010....There are some 60,000 beggars in New Delhi, most earning 50-100 rupees a day, not much less than the working poor, according to a recent government-commissioned study on beggars. Many are handicapped." (Yahoo News, 15 September)
Yes this is New Delhi part of the new vibrant Indian capitalism that we are told about. RD
The Glasgow & Edinburgh Branches Blog. Towards a better understanding of the world, in order to change it.
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