Are They Helpless or Hustling? The Uncomfortable Truth of Urban Begging in India

 

Air-conditioned air holds differently at a red light. From behind tempered glass, the city appears in slow motion: a child with a box of tissues; a man with a gauze-wrapped stump; a woman carrying a sleeping toddler whose head lolls with a suspicious stillness you don’t want to believe; a knock on the window—polite first, then insistent. You look ahead, counting down the signal, bargaining with your conscience. Maybe this person is gaming you. Maybe there’s a “racket.” Maybe it’s safer to do nothing. Yet the hand on the glass is a mirror; it reflects the unease of a country where modern prosperity idles inches from profound precarity. This essay traces the fault line that runs between the driver’s doubt and the beggar’s plea: the law that criminalised and then partly decriminalised begging; the religious traditions that sanctified alms; the economics of India’s informal city; and the psychology that makes strangers’ suffering feel negotiable. What emerges is neither a defense of every outstretched palm nor a condemnation of every refusal, but an attempt to look squarely at how a society chooses to see—or not see—its poor.

From Windshield Morality to Street-Level Reality

The judgment many Indians make at traffic signals—are they helpless or hustling?—is not simply a snap moral verdict; it’s a story we tell ourselves to live with contradiction. Researchers call one engine of that story the just-world hypothesis: the comforting belief that, broadly, people get what they deserve. When that belief is threatened by visible suffering, people explain it away—by inflating the supposed failings of those who suffer, or by minimizing their own obligation to respond. In the micro-theatre of a red light, this bias is reinforced by compassion fade and the identifiable-victim effect: we feel for the single vivid face but shut down as the faces multiply, converting a human encounter into a policy problem that belongs to “the government.” None of this proves that every beggar is honest or coerced; it shows that most drivers’ certainty about who is “faking” is often a psychological convenience more than an evidence-based conclusion. To get past convenience, we have to look beyond the glass: at data on homelessness and houselessness, at migration and disability, at the legal status of begging, and at how cities actually work for people with no cushion.

Counting the Unseen: What the Numbers Say (and Don’t)

India’s official lens on the street poor is imperfect by design; the houseless are hard to count and easy to ignore. The 2011 Census enumerated 1.77 million houseless people nationwide—about 15 per 10,000—with 938,000 in urban areas; Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra led absolute counts, and sex ratios were starkly skewed among the houseless. Civil society networks argue the true figures run higher, and city-level snapshots are volatile: Delhi has swung from ~16,000 in a DUSIB 2014 count to claims of 150,000–300,000 sleeping rough in recent surveys and press reports; the range itself signals chronic under-measurement and policy drift. Meanwhile, a nontrivial share of people on pavements are inter-state migrants, the mentally ill, the elderly without kin, and people with untreated disabilities—groups that face the sharp end of urban informality. Data gaps do not absolve anyone; they indict our measurement priorities. If we cannot even agree on how many are outside, our debates about “rackets” risk substituting suspicion for statistics.

(Sources: Census 2011 houseless abstracts; HLRN briefings; recent reportage on Delhi homelessness.)

Law and Order—or Order without Law? The 2018 Decriminalisation and After

For decades, Indian states relied on the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959 (and its extensions) to arrest, detain, and “rehabilitate” people for the act of asking for alms. In 2018, the Delhi High Court in Harsh Mander & Karnika Sawhney v. Union of India struck down key provisions of this law as unconstitutional—holding that criminalising begging punishes people for systemic failures and violates the right to life and dignity. Journalistic and legal commentary called it a watershed: the capital could no longer treat destitution as a crime. In 2021, amid COVID-era pleas, the Supreme Court added an important note of caution: the Court “would not take an elitist view” to ban begging, emphasizing that people beg in the absence of education and employment, and directing governments to focus on vaccination and rehabilitation rather than removal. Decriminalisation, however, is not the same as support. Without robust shelter capacity, mental-health services, and income pathways, the end of arrest simply leaves people to the same signals. The law can stop adding harm; it cannot by itself create help.

(Sources: Delhi HC judgment; Reuters coverage; legal analyses; SC remarks reported by national dailies.)

From Bhiksha and Dāna to the Red Light: India’s Long History of Alms

To see roadside begging only as a nuisance is to forget India’s civilizational memory of almsgiving. In Hindu traditions, bhiksha (alms) and dāna (charity) emerge from Vedic and classical texts, mapping a repertoire that includes support for renunciants, students, and the poor; in Buddhism, dāna is the first perfection and the beginning of a moral path; in Sikhism, langar collapses hierarchy through shared food; in Islam, zakat binds the prosperous to the needy. That history does not sanctify every knock on the glass; it contextualises it. Colonial and post-colonial governments reframed mendicancy as a problem of order, severing alms from ethics and poverty from policy. Today’s discomfort—“shouldn’t they work?”—is an inheritance of that pivot. Our past recognized the poor as a moral claim on the community; our present often treats them as an administrative inconvenience. The question is not whether alms “solve” poverty (they do not). It is whether a society with deep traditions of giving can modernize its compassion without outsourcing it to suspicion.

(Sources: doctrinal overviews of bhiksha/dāna; cultural essays on Indian giving; Buddhist teachings on dāna.)

Economics at the Signal: Informality, Income, and the ‘Racket’ Narrative

Few topics inflame middle-class conversations like the “organised begging mafia.” Rigorous, national-scale evidence is thin; local police busts and investigative features do find coercive rings that exploit children or the disabled. There are also credible studies documenting forced begging as trafficking, particularly of minors. But between the denial (“it’s all genuine”) and the generalisation (“it’s all a racket”), reality is mixed. The informal economy is India’s largest employer of last resort; for those shut out—because of injury, addiction, psychosis, documents, language, caste prejudice—begging is sometimes the only remaining margin. Daily “earnings” vary wildly by city, junction, time, and police pressure; the modal state is not scam, but precarity. A serious response must do two things at once: prosecute coercion where it exists, and provide exits where it does not. Otherwise, the “mafia” story becomes a moral alibi that lets cities ignore the far larger population of unorganised, unprotected poor in plain sight.

(Sources: social-science papers on begging in India; policy briefs; SSRN/legal overviews on trafficking/forced begging.)

Disability, Illness, and the Edges of Employability

One reason the “just get a job” refrain rings hollow is that a visible share of beggars are people with disabilities—amputations, untreated infections, congenital impairments—often compounded by mental illness or substance dependence. India’s labour market is unforgiving even for the able-bodied poor; for those with psychosis, epilepsy, or intellectual disability, reality is brutal: employers shun, families fracture, documentation lapses, medication is unaffordable, relapse is frequent. Women face layered risks: abandonment, intimate-partner violence, trafficking, and the burdens of caregiving without cash. When “employability” is invoked as a cudgel, it ignores these frictions. Any ethical urban response has to start with low-barrier shelters, assertive outreach, harm-reduction, and ID recovery, and only then speak of skilling. A city that cannot keep someone clean, fed, and medicated cannot credibly demand productivity from them.

(Sources: homelessness and shelter reports; ministry briefs; clinical and NGO literature on mental illness and street survival.)

Why We Doubt: Just-World Beliefs, Compassion Fade, and the Single Face

Back at the red light, psychology explains some of our worst instincts. The just-world bias pushes us to assume people deserve their lot; scope insensitivity dulls our empathy as numbers rise; the identifiable-victim effect makes us more generous to the single story than the crowd. We also rationalize non-giving with stories of fraud, whether or not we’ve verified them. These cognitive shortcuts serve a purpose: they protect us from burnout and help us navigate relentless exposure to need. But they also distort moral vision, turning structural failures into individual blame. The antidotes are not heroic: give through channels you trust; if you decline, do so without contempt; stay curious about the causes you cannot see; and remember that evidence beats anecdotes. The person at your window is neither proof that charity works nor proof that it doesn’t; they are evidence that the social contract frays exactly where the city is most shiny.

(Sources: classic and contemporary research on just-world beliefs; compassion fade; identifiable-victim literature.)

Children at the Window: Protection First, Not Policing Alone

Nothing polarises drivers like children selling pens or tapping on glass after 10 pm. The Juvenile Justice framework and anti-trafficking laws already recognize child begging as exploitation, requiring rescue, shelter, and family tracing. But “rescue” is not a photo-op; without follow-through—de-addiction, schooling, case-work, income support for families—children boomerang back to the same junctions, now smarter and more cynical. The public dramatizes “drugging rings” (some cases are real), yet often ignores migratory poverty that pushes families to put children to work. Effective city practice looks boring: night shelters that are safe, bridge schools, cash-plus support for caregivers, and police trained in child protection, not harassment. Outrage fades when the signal turns green; the child’s problem does not.

(Sources: JJ Act materials; NGO field reports; trafficking literature and media reports.)

Policy Pivot: From Handcuffs to Rehabilitation (The SMILE Experiment)

If criminalisation failed, what replaces it? The Union government’s SMILE umbrella scheme (Support for Marginalized Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise) launched in 2022 includes a sub-scheme for the Comprehensive Rehabilitation of Persons Engaged in Begging (guidelines updated Oct 2023). It funds identification, counselling, shelter, skilling, and reintegration through local bodies and NGOs. Early numbers suggest ambition exceeds capacity: one independent analysis cites roughly 9,958 people identified across 81 cities, with ~970 rehabilitated—a start, not a solution. City showcases (e.g., Indore’s “beggar-free” claim) report training, product lines, and family reunifications; other cities are just beginning baseline surveys. SMILE’s promise is in coordination—health, police, child-protection, shelters, IDs, jobs—yet that is precisely where Indian urban governance frays. Decriminalisation opened the door; delivery will decide whether people step through it.

(Sources: official SMILE pages, guidelines, and PIB notes; independent policy analyses; recent news on city pilots.)

Era-Gone-By vs. Today: From Mendicants to Margins of the Metropolis

In older India, the mendicant occupied a paradoxical prestige: renunciation conferred moral authority, and giving to the monk was a merit practice. Urban modernity flips the valence: market logic prizes productivity; the non-earning poor become an eyesore, not an ethical claim. The same society that funds temple kitchens and gurudwara langars flinches at a boy knocking on an SUV window. This is not hypocrisy so much as dislocation: the institutions that historically managed charity (kinship, guild, temple, monastery) cannot absorb the scale and anonymity of migrant megacities. The old script—householders give, monks receive—doesn’t cover a metropolis where the mendicant is neither monk nor neighbour. If we want compassion that fits the city, we must update the channels: cashless street-giving into verified funds, corporate kitchens linked to shelters, municipal dashboards that show real-time needs, and philanthropy that flows to boring operations, not just branded moments.

(Sources: cultural histories of alms; contemporary urban policy commentary.)

What Drivers Can Do: Between Cynicism and Sentimentality

Two reflexes fail us at red lights: sentimentality (give indiscriminately to feel good) and cynicism (never give because “it’s all a scam”). A saner middle path starts with clarity: if you choose to give in person, prefer food, water, sanitary supplies, or QR-linked donations to vetted shelters; if you choose not to, don’t demean. Support night-shelter ecosystems, harm-reduction, and community kitchens that outlast a signal cycle. Vote and volunteer for city capacity: shelters with women-safe spaces, mental-health linkages, and outreach teams that speak migrants’ languages. Ask your ward councillor one boring question: How many functional shelter beds exist tonight within 3 km, and who checks? Above all, keep judgment provisional. A society that sees every beggar as a thief will design policy like a lockbox; a society that sees every beggar as a saint will neglect systems. The work is to build systems sturdy enough that neither myth is necessary.

(Sources: practice notes from shelters and city pilots; behavioural science on giving.)

The Hardest Sentence: Some Are Coerced, Many Are Cornered

Yes, coercion exists; yes, there are gangs; yes, children are exploited. These require policing that is rights-literate and prosecutions that stick. But the larger truth is duller and more devastating: many who beg are cornered by structural scarcity—no address to get an ID, no ID to get a benefit, no benefit to stop a slide. Others are pulled under by illness, addiction, grief, or disability. To call this “easy money” is to confess distance from the street. None of this obliges anyone to hand out coins at signals; it obliges a city to stop recycling the poor between junctions, lock-ups, shelters, and pavements. When you feel the urge to explain away the hand at your window, try a harder thought: what would it take for this person to not be here next month? If your answer begins and ends with “they should work,” you have described your hope, not their options.

Reflection: The Glass is Thinner Than It Looks

The moral comfort of the driver’s seat is an illusion. The glass is not a wall; it is a lens that magnifies our stories about worth, work, and waste. The beggar might be hustling, helpless, coerced, recovering, or simply surviving today to try again tomorrow. The city will contain all of these truths until it chooses an architecture of care strong enough to make signal-side charity unnecessary. Until then, our ethics at red lights should be modest: refuse contempt, resist convenient myths, and route generosity into channels that outlast a green light. The goal is not to romanticise begging or romanticise giving; it is to retire the question by building a city where no one has to ask it.

References

Delhi High Court Judgment (Harsh Mander & Anr. v. UOI & Ors., 08 Aug 2018) – PDF copy via HLRN: https://hlrn.org.in/documents/HC_Delhi_Decriminalisation_of_Begging.pdf

Harsh Mander & Anr. vs UOI & Ors., text via Indian Kanoon: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/117834652/

Reuters (Thomson Reuters Foundation). “Begging is not a crime, Delhi High Court rules.” https://www.reuters.com/article/world/begging-is-not-a-crime-delhi-high-court-rules-idUSKBN1KU1FG/

IDR (India Development Review). “The decriminalisation of begging.” https://idronline.org/decriminalisation-of-begging/

Supreme Court remarks on pleas during COVID (“won’t take an elitist view”): Times of India report. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/cant-take-elitist-view-to-ban-begging-supreme-court/articleshow/84809917.cms

The Economic Times (SC remarks, 27 Jul 2021). https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/wont-take-elitist-view-of-banning-beggars-from-streets-says-sc-on-plea-for-their-rehab-amid-covid/articleshow/84785407.cms

NDTV (SC remarks). https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/wont-take-elitist-view-of-banning-beggars-from-streets-supreme-court-2496375

Census of India 2011 – Houseless (PCA HS, district level): https://censusindia.gov.in/nada/index.php/catalog/5047

Census summary (houseless overview). https://www.census2011.co.in/houseless.php

HLRN (Homelessness overview; urban numbers). https://hlrn.org.in/homelessness

Population Association of America paper (houseless metrics based on 2011). https://paa2019.populationassociation.org/uploads/190986

Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment – SMILE scheme overview. https://socialjustice.gov.in/schemes/99

SMILE sub-scheme guidelines (Comprehensive Rehabilitation of Persons Engaged in Begging). https://grants-msje.gov.in/display-smile-guidelines

PIB press release on SMILE allocations (12 Feb 2022 launch; outlays). https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1806161

Lok Sabha starred question annex (SMILE-B guidelines issued 23.10.2023). https://sansad.in/getFile/loksabhaquestions/annex/183/AU3583_HdFtsx.pdf?source=pqals

IMPRI policy note on SMILE outcomes and constraints (2025). https://www.impriindia.com/insights/support-marginalized-individual-scheme/

Just-world hypothesis primer and sources (Lerner 1980; Rubin & Peplau 1975). https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/just-world-hypothesis

Lerner, M. J. The Belief in a Just World (book chapter overview). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-0448-5_2

Identifiable-victim/singularity effects (open-access article, 2024). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10977801/

Meta-analysis on compassion fade (2019). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597818302930

Wisdom Library – Bhiksha (concept and sources). https://www.wisdomlib.org/concept/bhiksha

Overview of almsgiving traditions (Hindu/Buddhist context). https://www.hinduwebsite.com/buddhism/practical/dana_praciceofgiving.asp

SSRN article (legal status, organized exploitation, SMILE). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/5208299.pdf?abstractid=5208299&mirid=1

Social Science Journal PDF (2020) on begging’s causes/implications incl. organized exploitation claims. https://www.socialsciencejournal.in/assets/archives/2020/vol6issue6/9041-535.pdf

Times of India (2025) – City-level homelessness and shelter capacity debates (Delhi). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/lakhs-homeless-in-delhi-little-planning-on-their-relief/articleshow/121523850.cms

Times of India (2025) – Indore’s SMILE showcase as “beggar-free city.” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/indore/indore-shows-the-way-to-a-beggar-free-city-at-national-workshop/articleshow/122394750.cms