VIJAYAWADA: Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) working for child rights protection are struggling allegedly due to high political pressure while rescuing children and infants from the begging mafia.
Members of several NGOs have observed that organised begging mafia is very strong and it is not easy to control their activities due to strong political backing.
“Group of beggars will approach respective corporators, later MLAs to tell them that some NGOs are attacking them. Later, such politicians will start protecting those beggars even after understanding that they are taking infants for rent. Many times, we have got calls from politicians,” a district official from the Women and Child Welfare Department said.
No mechanism to monitor parents who rent children
In the last two years, District Child Protection Unit rescued around 150 street children, including 20 infants, from begging. After rescue, the infants were handed over to respective biological mothers, but they are unable to carry further monitoring mechanism on parents to prevent them from repeating the offence of renting their children to beggars.
“Beggar gangs are very powerful. It is not easy to rescue children from such gangs. They operate begging in an organised way. Some years back, beggars attacked one labour commissioner in Hyderabad in public for implementing strict rules on beggars. But, no action had been taken over that attack,” a member of HELP organisation told Express.
Beggars sedate kids using sleeping pills, opium
The HELP organisation member said that because of the poor enforcement of Begging Act in Andhra Pradesh, over 1.7 lakh beggars in the State are operating an organised crime. “Beggars used to take infants for rent from their parents keep the children on sedation for the whole day by using sleeping pills and conventional sedative drugs like ‘Nalla Mandu’,” he said.
According to members of Childline, beggars are coming to Vijayawada from neighbouring districts of Guntur, Prakasam, Nellore and West Godavari through passenger trains to take children and even infants for rent of `300 per day from parents hail from Rajarajeswaripet and Payakapuram areas in Vijayawada.
Not many cases, say police
According to one senior police officer in Vijayawada police commissionerate, who earlier worked in Crime Investigation Department (CID), said that not many cases had been registered in Vijayawada under the Begging Act.
Also, begging mafia in Andhra Pradesh is not high unlike Hyderabad and Mumbai. “We will work with the NGOs and will act upon specific information especially regarding the issue of infants for rent. No one is coming forward to provide credible information to us,” one senior police officer in City Crime Records Bureau (CCRB) said.
Need for new approaches
However, NGOs working in urban slums are differing with the idea of prohibition of begging and opined that there was a need to develop approaches based on socio-economical framework to eliminate begging in the State, but not to see all beggars as anti-social elements.
Pragada Vasu, president of Association for Urban and Tribal Development, a Vizag-based group of State level NGOs working in urban slums, said that it was true that beggars were committing criminal activities. “But, it is not appropriate to see every homeless beggar in that aspect,” he said.
According to Vasu, there will be 0.5 per cent of beggars in every respective city like Vizag, Kakinada, Vijayawada and Tirupati in the State. As per rapid mapping exercise based on Supreme Court guidelines, there are around 3.4 lakh homeless in Andhra Pradesh living on footpaths. Among them, around 1.7 lakh are beggars.