Why in news?

• The Delhi High Court recently quashed those provisions of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA) that make begging a punishable offence.

What were the provisions?

• The legal position of beggars in India has always been precarious.
• The Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA), 1959, which has held sway for decades, rests on the premise that poverty equals criminality.
• This allows the state to arrest people without a warrant on nothing more than a “suspicion,” and put them out of the public gaze.
• Invariably, police raids to round up “beggars” and force them out of city limits are part of projects to “clean up” cities.
• The people targeted by the anti-begging laws are not in anyone’s “constituency” given their social and economic deprivation.
• Under the act, beggars, peddlers, small-time hawkers, street performers, ragpickers, and “loiterers” (including migrants), can be arrested without a warrant or let off on a bond or detained in a certified institution for two to three years and, on a second conviction, for 10 years.
• Effectively, this posits the beggar as a legal outsider: inhabiting the same territorial space that is India, but disenfranchised from the benefits of Indian citizenship that guarantees constitutional rights. 
• Case studies have shown that the legal due process is hardly ever followed by the magistrate courts, which send those arrested to beggar homes after conviction.
• It is enough for a person to “look like a beggar” in order to be arrested.

What was the verdict?

• The Delhi High Court has rectified this by conceding that begging is a structural problem.
• It argued that it is unfair of the state to add insult to injury and punish people for its own failures.
• The court quashed those provisions of the BPBA that make begging a punishable offence.
• However, its ruling is applicable only to Delhi.
• The Delhi High Court judge pointed out the difference between duress (forced by a criminal gang to beg) and necessity (forced to beg due to poverty, hunger and lack of legitimate choices).
• He also made what is now a historical observation: “They beg to survive, to remain alive. For any civilised society to have persons belonging to this category is a disgrace and a failure of the State. To subject them to further ignominy and deprivation by ordering their detention in a certified institution is nothing short of dehumanising them.”