It is past midnight and the only shards of light at Lucknow’s Parivartan Chauraha are from passing vehicles and icecream trolleys making their way home. Bhola stretches out a tarpaulin sheet on the footpath, which will be his bed for the night. The rickshaw-puller shares footpath space with a group of other homeless people.
“The police come and chase us away with sticks. Drug-addicts loot us and beat us. Mosquitoes bite us,” he says, “but there is still a sense of peace.” For Bhola, none of this compares to the disturbing past he has left behind.
Born Vijay Bahadur Singh to a poor landless Thakur family in Unnao district in Uttar Pradesh, Bhola, now 42, was a child when he got lost in a crowded market in Lucknow, where his father had come to sell cattle fodder.
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Salim ‘Langda’, a homeless man, adopted him. Bhola began begging to survive. Some years later, his family found him and took him back to a normal life of work and marriage. But when his wife died in childbirth, a distraught Bhola headed back to Lucknow for work. Instead of a job, though, he found himself outside a temple, Shani Mandir, and there he became a beggar again. “I used to feel embarrassed at first, but I had no choice,” he says.
A second chance
But life would change again when he met a young research scholar named Sharad Patel, who was working for the welfare of beggars. Patel convinced Bhola to give up begging and through Bikshavritti Mukti Andolan, he helped him get an Aadhar card and a cycle-rickshaw. Today, the man earns about ₹250 a day, of which ₹40 goes towards rent for the rickshaw.
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Over the past three years, Patel and his small team, which includes Magsaysay awardee Sandeep Pandey, have inspired 22 people to give up begging. While some of them ply rickshaws, others have opened small stalls or work as labourers.
In fact, one of them, Diwakar Singh, 32, teaches 30 children now, at a school run by Patel’s team, earning ₹3,200 a month. Singh’s story in many ways is representative of the complexity of the begging scourge.
Born to a policeman in Ballia district, Singh had a Master’s degree in political science, a family, and employment in the construction business. Life turned upside down when his daughter developed a deadly lung disease. Singh spent all his savings to get her treated in Kanpur, and was left a pauper.
Papa don’t preach
He came to Lucknow, but found no job. He became an ordinary labourer, and started living on the street, going to a temple for free food. Then one day, he read about Patel in the newspaper and reached out for help. “I felt miserable begging. People would preach, but nobody had a job to give,” says Singh.
When Patel started first, his initial goal was to ensure that temples in Lucknow provided free and clean food to beggars, like gurudwaras. He soon realised this was not a permanent solution, and began to work to make them independent. His next target is to find them homes.
Patel conducted a survey of 3,500 beggars in 2015. He says that 98% of them in Lucknow said they would quit begging if they found jobs. There are eight government homes for beggars in U.P. — in Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, Agra, Mathura, Faizabad and Ayodhya. But none is occupied, Patel says.
The one in Varanasi has been rented out to students, while the one in Lucknow is dilapidated and unoccupied from 2001, even as its staff continues to draw salaries. “Sections 9 and 10 of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition Of Beggary Act, 1975, criminalise begging. Even if they are brought to these homes, they are treated like prisoners,” says Patel.
The government is clearly unable and unwilling to bring them back into the mainstream. “Making them self-reliant and providing them shelter is the only way out,” according to Patel.