Srinagar among 30 cities to be made beggar free by 2026

New Delhi: Srinagar has been identified as one of the 30 cities to be made “free of beggary” by 2026, the Times of India reported on Monday. The rehabilitation program, aimed at those begging in the streets, will be undertaken as part of the country’s Support for Marginalized Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprises (SMILE) scheme.

Besides Srinagar in J&K, the list includes ten places of religious significance, including Ayodhya, the town in Uttar Pradesh state where Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently inaugurated a temple devoted to the Hindu deity Ram. Guwahati, Madurai, Puducherry, Shimla, Mysuru, and Jaisalmer are some of the other cities named in the list.

Wayside begging has become a major issue in Srinagar in recent years, involving mostly vulnerable migrant children. Civil society voices in J&K have been calling to address this challenge, by creating durable solutions for vulnerable people engaging in begging in the city. Srinagar city’s image of a tourist city and face of a changing and growing India has also been cited as a reason why the problem needs to be addressed.

Twenty-five designated cities have already forwarded an “action plan,” and surveys are already being launched for the begging community to find out, for instance, what they would want to do for livelihood, the Times of India report noted. It added that the plan includes a survey, mobilization, relocation to a shelter, and a “comprehensive” rehabilitation scheme through education, skill development, and employment.

Next month, India’s Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment will launch a national portal and mobile application for storing data on persons engaged in begging. The funding for implementing the action plan will come from the central government. In its 2011 census, India found that over 400,000 people in the country are “beggars and vagrants.”

New Delhi’s drive to lessen the number of poor on its streets comes at a time when the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is witnessing major spikes, with these trends set to continue over the next few years. In December last year, the S&P Global Ratings predicted that India would become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, and it is also set to be the fastest-growing economy over the next three years.

Last December, the country’s Reserve Bank bumped up its GDP growth projection for the current financial year to 7% from a previous estimate of 6.5 %.
Unemployment, a major cause of worry for the government, has also been trending downward in recent years. The unemployment rate for individuals aged 15 and over hit a six-year low of 3.2% from July 2022 to June 2023, as per data in the Periodic Labor Force Survey Annual Report 2022-2023. However, despite this improvement, J&K’s unemployment rate remains one of the highest in the country.

Last year, a report on poverty by NITI Aayog said the country had lifted 135 million Indians out of poverty in the previous five years. The report, published in July, assessed “acute deprivations in health, education, and standard of living” using UN-approved parameters. In 2022, around 15% of the Indian population lived in poverty, compared to 24.8% in 2015-16.