MARCOS GONSALVES
In Goa — one of India’s wealthiest states by per capita income, with a glittering tourism economy worth thousands of crores — women clutching infants approach cars at traffic lights in Margao. Children beg on the beaches of Cal angute. The homeless sleep on the pavement in front of the Panjim church. And the government’s response is detention, a fine and re lease — until the sequence repeats itself. Some estimates place the number of beggars in Goa in the region of 270-300. The Goa Prevention of Begging Act has been on the books since 1972. It man dates detention, care and rehabilitation. It provides for certified homes, counselling, voca tional training and reinte gration. In more than 50 years, the government has built none of it.
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There are no reports of Section 6 of the Act — which permits detention of up to 10 years for repeat offenders — ever being invoked in Goa. What does get in voked, repeatedly and with far greater enthusiasm, are arrests, publicity-driven crackdowns and the ritualised ‘drive’. Then comes the fine, followed by release. Soon enough, the beggar is back at the same traffic signal. Police have publicly admitted that enforcement achieves nothing lasting be cause there is nowhere to send people and nothing to offer beyond a revolving door of detention and discharge. South Goa alone registered 198 begging cases in 2024, up from 164 in 2023. “Anti-begging drives are carried out periodically for publicity purposes, but there is no sustained follow-up action to prevent repeat offences,” said Rohan Naik, a local resident who has watched this cycle repeat for years. He is not wrong. The law is explicit. The State was required to establish certified homes — fa cilities with medical support, counselling, skills training and shelter — to re ceive and rehabilitate those detained.
Decades later, Goa has not built a single dedicated adult rehabilitation centre. Instead, police are left, in their own words, with “limited options after detention.” In practice, the only option is release. “Without such facilities, police are left with limited options after detention. In many cases, offenders are simply released, allowing them to return to the same locations and continue begging,” said Freddy D’Souza, a resident of Margao. The Social Welfare Department, whose mandate includes this very popula tion, has maintained a studied silence on why the infrastructure mandated un der the law remains unbuilt. There is no official explanation. No timeline. No publicly available budget allocation. Only the annual spectacle of crackdowns. The most disturbing dimension of this failure involves children. Women car rying infants are a fixture at traffic signals across the State. Activists have long warned that these children are not incidental — they are used to elicit sympathy and donations while being exposed daily to exhaust fumes and moving traffic.
The Bombay High Court at Goa has taken note. It recently directed the State government to place on record the measures being taken to curb child begging and protect minors found at traffic signals and public spaces, while questioning the absence of any comprehensive rehabilitation framework. Advocate Moses Pinto, who filed the petition that triggered this judicial scru tiny, is blunt about what his case revealed. “My petition before the court concerns the exploitation of underprivileged children at traffic junctions. In this regard, the office of the Advocate General has assured the court that an action plan will be formulated in the coming days. However, on a broader level, there has been a failure to curb the growing men ace of begging in Goa,” he said. The irony is difficult to miss — an action plan ‘in the coming days’ in 2026 for a law enacted in 1972. Authorities have rescued some minors and placed them in welfare homes such as Apna Ghar in Merces. But rescue without family rehabilitation is thea tre. Removing a child from a begging family and placing them in a shelter while the family remains destitute solves nothing — it merely shifts the problem out of public view. “The continued presence of children begging on roads is a matter of concern for society. There is an urgent need for coordinated action by the police, Social Welfare Department and child protection authorities to ensure these children are brought into schools and safe shelters,” said Sweta Naik from Margao. The government’s entire approach rests on a convenient fiction that begging is a law-and-order problem. It is not.
Poverty, distress migration, addiction, dis ability and the collapse of social safety nets push people onto the streets. “Begging continues to exist because root causes such as poverty, migration and unemployment are not being addressed effectively. Unless the administra tion comes out with a permanent rehabilitation policy, the problem will contin ue to persist in urban areas,” said Silvester Dias, a resident of Margao. Police themselves have pointed to the challenge of tracking organised begging networks and identifying interstate migrants operating in commercial areas and tourist belts. This is an acknowledgement that the issue is structured and multi-layered — something periodic crackdowns will never dismantle. The solutions are not mysterious. They require political will and sustained funding — precisely why they have not happened. First, Goa needs functional rehabilitation centres — not announcements, but actual facilities with medical care, mental health support, addiction counselling and vocational training. Adv Pinto pointed to the Covid pandemic as proof of concept. “During the Covid pandemic, the State government successfully implemented several measures, including accommodating beggars and migrants in stadiums. Similar efforts can now be undertaken through the establishment of rehabilita tion centres,” he said. If the State could act during a crisis, it can act in a chronic emergency. Second, the law itself requires rethinking. The Delhi High Court, in a land mark ruling, struck down penal provisions of the Bombay Prevention of Beg ging Act as unconstitutional, holding that “the State simply cannot fail to provide for its most vulnerable and then criminalise them for being in that condition.” Goa’s law operates on the same colonial logic — punishing the poor for poverty. Adv Pinto has also called for decriminalisation. “Instead of criminalising beg ging, there should be a move towards decriminalisation,” he said. Third, CSR funds could be directed towards the crisis. “The government can ask big companies to utilise CSR funds for creating basic infrastructure and providing livelihood opportunities. Such measures will go a long way in addressing and reducing the menace of begging in the State,” Adv Pinto added. It is a suggestion that would cost the State little while potentially creating infrastructure quickly. Finally, there must be coordination.
At present, police, the Social Welfare De partment, municipal bodies and child protection agencies operate in silos, each pointing to the other’s failure. “Begging at traffic junctions has become a recurring issue in Goa and reflects the system’s failure to rehabilitate the poor and homeless. The government must act with compassion and responsibility instead of conducting only occa sional drives,” said social activist Rodney Pereira. Goa brands itself as a destination of beauty, leisure and abundance. Behind that brand, in plain sight at major traffic signals across its towns and cities, lies evidence of a different reality — one the State has chosen, for more than five decades, to manage rather than solve.
