New Delhi, India is in a clean­ing up process before the Com­mon­wealth Games next sum­mer. The city has already erected walls around the city’s slums to vis­i­tors can’t see them. Now, the city is round­ing up beg­gars and hid­ing them in jail. How­ever, even the New Delhi’s best efforts to “clean up” gets tied up in bureaucracy.

From Australia’s The Age, a reporter went for a ride in one of the clean up vans.

There are beg­gars aplenty in the Indian cap­i­tal — an esti­mated 58,000 of them, accord­ing to a 2006 Office of Social Wel­fare sur­vey, although many char­i­ties work­ing with street peo­ple say that fig­ure is laugh­ably low.

The squad mem­bers — four plain­clothes con­sta­bles and a super­vis­ing inspec­tor — do not walk more than a block before they spot the first beg­gars, a pair of elderly women.

The police stop, sur­vey them, then move on. They pause to make note of a few older men squat­ted on a side­walk, hands out­stretched to passersby. Then some chil­dren. The police do not, how­ever, actu­ally arrest anyone.

The mag­is­trate who trav­els in their van, poised to process the men­di­cants and dis­patch them instantly to alms houses, sits read­ing news­pa­pers and sweat­ing in his black suit and tie.

“The judge ordered us to leave the lep­ers,” says Const. Ashok Kokhar, as he steps around a half-dressed man expos­ing sores to beg for coins out­side a mosque that is a huge tourist attraction.

“He doesn’t want any­one con­ta­gious in the van.”

They pass more old women, whom they leave in their alley.

“Any­one who looks old — 70 or 80 — we are leav­ing them, because what would they do in jail,” Const. Usha Rani says.
…

Many of those who work to help Delhi’s street poor say the mobile courts — and indeed the law that crim­i­nalises beg­ging — are mis­guided at best and bar­baric at worst.

“The per­son arrested is being pun­ished for being poor, but poverty is caused by state poli­cies,” says Paramjeet Kaur, direc­tor of Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan, a shel­ter that pro­vides street peo­ple with legal help.

“But instead of look­ing at that, or address­ing real needs of peo­ple on the street, they just put them away in locked homes.”

Mean­while, the gov­ern­ment offers no shel­ters that peo­ple can access with­out being arrested, she says.

The courts mostly detain “peo­ple who do not have the power to ques­tion or chal­lenge why they have been picked up”.