A woman with a baby in her arms was seen begging in front of the capital’s Pan Pacific Sonargaon hotel in the Karwan Bazar area.
The particular area is one of the places in the city the Department of Social Services has declared beggar-free.
When asked why she was begging in front of the hotel, the woman said that she was not alone and that many beggars beg at the place.
“I have been begging here for many months, no one says anything to me,” she said.
Meanwhile, a one-legged man was also seen begging in the same street. When he was approached for a few questions, the man went away without answering the question.
Beggars have once again been crowding at important intersections in the city.
Over the years, the government has taken different projects and programmes to create alternative sources of income for beggars but they have failed to make a mark.
The government had announced plans to make the country beggar-free by 2018 by arranging alternative livelihood for the people involved with begging.
In 2018, the Department of Social Services asked the District Commissioners (DC) to prepare a list of people who need to be rehabilitated. According to that list, the number of beggars stands at 2.5 lakh.
Recently, the Department of Social Services conducted a survey to learn the number of beggars across the country. The latest research said there are 7 lakh beggars across the country.
The authorities said they are trying to encourage people from begging.
Current initiatives
The government has been implementing two initiatives to discourage people from choosing to beg.
Photo: Ariful Islam Mithu
One of the initiatives is to provide money to the DCs across the country to rehabilitate local beggars so that they do not come to Dhaka.
The other programme is to launch drives in different parts of the city, detain them and keep them in government shelter centres for different terms to rehabilitate them.
Visiting the government shelter centre in Mirpur, it was learned most of the beggars come to Dhaka during Ramadan. The manager of the centre, Al-Amin Jalali, said a total of 54 beggars are now there.
He said that last June nearly 1,000 beggars were detained from different parts of the city and kept in different shelter centres.
According to Md Shah Jahan, the head of the rehabilitation programme and a deputy director of the Department of Social Welfare, such drives are yielding results as some people quit begging. But he also said that some people never quit begging.
“We give priority to those places where there are foreigners to protect the country’s image,” he added.
Asked why the beggars beg at the beggars-free area, the programme director said that there are some syndicates who run the racket.
“We set up mobile court and arrest and they come back again because there are some bad people behind them who force them to beg,” he added.
Around Tk8 crore has been given to the district commissioners across the country in the current fiscal year, the beggar rehabilitation programme head said. The DCs were given the task of rehabilitating the beggars in the local area so that they don’t come to the capital city.
The authorities said that they do not know how many people have been permanently rehabilitated with the initiatives of the Department of Social Welfare.
Shah Jahan said they have not done any assessment so he cannot tell how many beggars have been rehabilitated so far.
Initiatives not yielding positive results
A 2023 study titled “Unraveling the effects of a rehabilitation program on the socioeconomic wellbeing of beggars and begging motivation: evidence from an urban area of Bangladesh” found that the government’s programme fails to deter beggars from continuing to beg, as the result shows no significant association between taking part in the programme and demotivation for begging.
Researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the rehabilitation in the Khulna City Corporation (KCC) area, they gathered a sample of 385 beggars by employing the non-equivalent group design and instrumental variable regression method.
Consequently, the beggars are continuing begging, which indicates a critical policy failure on the part of both government and implementation bodies, the study said.
Therefore, the study implicitly recommends on-track monitoring and timely evaluation of such interventions so that immediate action can be taken beforehand to empower people involved in begging and move them up the social ladder both socially and economically.
Recently the Social Welfare Minister Dr Dipu Moni said the ministry is going to make a database for beggars in the country.
Department of Social Welfare Deputy Director Shah Jahan said a database is very important to identify individual beggars.
“We will need a database to facilitate the rehabilitation of the beggars,” he added.
He said that the database will help the authorities to make policy decisions including the determination of budget allocation.
