Charity, too, can have an ugly face
Gauging the exact figure is a gruellingly difficult task owing to majority of the country’s economic activities being undocumented, but experts warrant educated and proximate guesses on the basis of miracles that are witnessed every day in hospitals, old age homes, orphanages and seminaries
We are a generous nation. What makes us one is incontrovertibly clear because we are an Islamic republic. Although private donations hinder in assessing the whole story, the amount of collections and spending of charities working in Pakistan provide with the intuitive awareness of the big picture.
Islamabad-based NGO Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy derived statistics from a report of the National Survey of Individual Giving conducted in 1998-99 by the Aga Khan Development Network and extrapolated its findings to conclude that free-hearted Pakistanis donated approximately Rs300 billion to different charities in year 2013-14.
A study conducted by the ministry of information, broadcasting and national heritage’s research body Pakistan Peace Collective, however, reports a more-than-double figure of Rs650 billion that is given in charity by Pakistanis every year.
Gauging the exact figure is a gruellingly difficult task owing to majority of the country’s economic activities being undocumented, but experts warrant educated and proximate guesses on the basis of miracles that are witnessed every day in hospitals, old age homes, orphanages and seminaries. Alms given to mosques, needy relatives and mendicants on daily or monthly basis also contribute to the massive total these people with big hearts manage to amass.
One such magnificent epitome of charitable organisations operating in Pakistan from the donations of resident Pakistanis and expats is Edhi Foundation whose annual budget mounts to around Rs1.5 billion. Despite anything to the contrary, there has been a searing diminution in funds received by the organisation since Abdul Sattar Edhi’s demise last year, as revealed by his son.
“Edhi sahib had been working since 1951 and he worked extensively for 10 to 15 years, after which he took to the streets to beg. If I start begging without doing that kind of work, people will think that this is just another beggar,” Faisal Edhi elaborated.
This is one side of the story.
Investigations conducted by police at different points in time divulge the ways this business operates, with most of the beggars working in groups and protecting each other. Accounts of raids and arrests follow the same old tale of regrouping, making beggary appear to be a fertile line of employing for the country’s freeloaders
The flipside is the incessant growth in the profession of beggary and embedment of its foible economics. The alms-giving culture is based on traits of compassion and benevolence along with a few indistinct and debatable ones. These obscured intentions include witnessing the misery and despondency in eyes of the indigent, counting the wrinkles on his face and white strands of hair on his head to estimate the state of adversity he has been living in, and capricious contentment to be on the giving end rather than receiving.
All the aforementioned criteria are in actuality fulfilled when people give money to beggars who tread the carefully divided and demarcated turfs at main crossings, markets, mosques, hospitals, shrines and traffic lights. Who allots them their territories is no more an unrevealed secret. Gang ring leaders identified by vagabonding beggars as “thekedaars” and “seth sahibs” run these tightly knit beggar mafias and remain in continuous search for new entrants.
Elderly and youth with or without peculiarly freakish deformities, knocking windows of cars, spreading hands and begging are a common sight in metropolises of Pakistan. Crooked legs, broken arms, burnt blotches of skin unclothed for ease of visibility, and placards with state of widowhood mentioned over them are displays that incite contempt as well as pity.
But what confuses is the setting wherein a woman of uncertain age, her hair ungroomed and dirty and her head bowed in grief, is found strolling on roads with a sleeping baby in her arms. Sometimes you may catch a similar sight of a woman with much the same appearance sitting on a roadside but yet again holding a slumbering baby in her lap. The question is: Why are the children in hands of beggars always sleeping? Why never sobbing or screaming or moving limbs? And why do not the babies grow at all?
The answer to this is also not unknown. Sources reveal that the infants used in this street-side business are rented out by criminal syndicates and even drugged to keep them quiet. Babies are pumped up with tranquilisers or sedatives in order to make them calm and compliant during the long working hours. Metabolism of many babies gives up to shocks of overdosing, resulting in their death during the working day and making their pretentious mothers hold their dead bodies till evening that marks the end of their duty hours.
“People sympathise easily with you if you’ve got a baby,” explained Shoaib, a local who had dropped a few coins in cupped hands of such a woman, carrying yet another sleeping infant, a few moments before being interviewed.
The aforesaid account explicitly apprises us that doleful women holding sleeping, or probably dead, infants are rarely their real mothers. What needs to be pondered over is the source that supplies babies to these mafias. The most discernible sources of new-borns are hospitals, hence hinting at reported kidnappings of neonates by facilitators and their probable fate. Does this not imply that we, the kind-hearted givers, directly finance abductions of newly born children through the money we give in the name of alms and private charity?
“I have witnessed six cases of abduction during my three years of service. The facilitating women who took the neonates out of the premises of the hospital could not be identified and no one knows about the babies’ whereabouts to date,” revealed a doctor, currently serving in a government hospital in Lahore, on condition of anonymity.
Sonia, a preadolescent veteran beggar in Lahore’s posh area of Defence, periodically adjusts a two-year-old on her hip with a corner of her dupatta hanging from her mouth. “He is my brother,” she claimed while smiling timidly. She, however, confessed on being given Rs1,000 that she first saw the toddler a few months back when her “seth” allocated the mentioned area to her. “I never saw my parents. I don’t have food and I am hungry, that is why I have to come here and beg. Sahib wants his money by the end of the day so I have to earn a little extra to feed myself.” The hard-hitting confessions did tell us about the harsh realities of the executors in this business but could not snatch away from her face the beaming smile of hers.
Sonia, like thousands of other children, is in the process of losing her childhood to getting a hold of an earning which is eventually either entirely or partially snatched away from them.
“My thekedar will beat me and expel me from the area if I do not pay a cut to him. He has stationed me on this main crossing because it conveniently wins me around Rs600 every day,” said Kashif, who was found wiping windscreens of cars at a traffic signal in Lahore’s Gulberg area.
Government of Pakistan, in parallel to several NGOs, is making efforts to eradicate this social evil, the scope of which is increasing day by day.
Iftikhar Mubarik, a child rights activist, says: “Children don’t run away because their families are poor. Many of them abandon their homes because they witness violence and physical abuse. NGOs can only facilitate their return; long-term sustainability of such interventions depends on the government’s help.”
Lahore High Court, in 2011, ruled that the government should discourage “professional beggary” through strict enforcement of laws, improvement of channels of charity and setting up homes for rehabilitation of paupers in extension of the 1958 West Pakistan Vagrancy Ordinance that declared begging illegal in the country.
Though Child Protection and Welfare Bureau claims to have facilitated around 40,000 neglected and poor children by 2014, the Asian Human Rights Commission estimates the presence of at least 1.2 million children on the roads of Pakistan’s metropolitan cities and urban centres.
The Beggar’s Home established in 2014 in Lahore by Punjab government’s Social Welfare Department provides facilities of rehabilitation, vocational training, medical treatment, religious education, legal support and follow up, but has the capacity to accommodate only 50 persons at a time, which is far too less a number as compared to the destitute awaiting help under the open sky.
As reported by several reputed lawyers, most beggars, if arrested, get bail and add that the profession has become so lucrative that these professionals do not care about apprehension or one-month imprisonment. “Judges also take into consideration the lack of welfare homes for destitute people, resulting in the offenders resorting to begging upon release.”
Investigations conducted by police at different points in time divulge the ways this business operates, with most of the beggars working in groups and protecting each other. Accounts of raids and arrests follow the same old tale of regrouping, making beggary appear to be a fertile line of employing for the country’s freeloaders.
The only possible way to pare down this racket is by educating Pakistanis to think wisely before giving donations, believe in doing charity amenably in the absence of receiver(s) and/or witnesses, and kerb the common practice of handing over smaller currency notes whenever a beggar holds out a hand for alms because nothing else can channelise the human resource being wasted.
