Children beg for alms; adults ask for relief

The district is witnessing a rapid increase in the number of child beggars. Children aged one to 18 years are seen pestering people especially at bus stops. The menace of such child beggars is prevalent all over the district, although it is increasingly to be found in Udupi and Manipal, as compared to the other two taluks, Karkala and Kundapur. The child beggars are found in large numbers at the government and city bus stop areas in Udupi while in Manipal it is, again, at the bus stop.

The children who go around begging, however, complain of having been pushed into the trade by their parents. Also, some of them are students of the government school at Nittur, but the additional problem faced by the beggars is that their absence has not been considered serious by either the school teachers or the head teacher. The students do attend the classes, but only some days in a week, and spend the remaining days on the streets begging.

Very often, the beggar is a woman carrying an infant and wandering about for alms. The authenticity of the motherhood of such women is also at question, as in most cases, begging is a trade and the infants are not of the beggar women.

The child beggars don’t just ask for alms – instead, they virtually ‘hunt down’ the people, until the latter give up and hand the children alms. Interestingly, the children ‘demand’ money, and refuse or are reluctant to accept eatables instead of alms.

The Labour Department officials conduct raids and take both such child and women beggars into custody. The relief, however, is barely a few hours long, as whoever is in charge of the ‘begging trade’ intervenes, to get the beggars out of the rehabilitation centre and back on the streets.

Dhatri, a resident of Brahmavar and student of architecture at the Manipal Institute of Technology, told Deccan Herald that this was a form of harassment, and one needs great patience to escape from the child beggars. “If you don’t give the children alms, they use foul language and even curse such people. There have been instances when the children snatched away eatables from my hand as I was about to eat. I pity them, but experiencing such torture at their hands day-after-day becomes unbearable,” she insisted.

Althaf Ahmed, a bank employee, concurred on being at the receiving end of harassment at the hands of these child beggars on a daily basis. “I have to travel everyday from Kaup, and these children ‘attack’ me every time I get off or try to board the buses,” he said.

Prameela Kamath, another ‘victim’, says the officials should take action and ensure these children get schooling. “It is really painful to see these children, who were supposed to be in schools, roaming around irrespective of the scorching sun or heavy rainfall. I doubt if these children are properly fed, even after they struggle to collect the alms for the entire day,” she says with concern.

The stories of the child beggars will, in turn, result in surprises and shocks.  One child says that if she does not agree to beg, her parents beat her. She says she wants to go to school, but her parent are sending her two little brothers to a government school and making her beg.

Another child by name Archana is still trying to come out of the shock of her younger sister being sold to some unknown lady for money by her father. She adds that the shock and fear have only led her to obey her father.