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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Begging and Criminality -Prabhat Patnaik
-NetworkIdeas.org

On Wednesday August 8, the Delhi High Court decriminalized begging in the capital. In the course of its hearing it had raised the question how begging could be an offence in a country where the government was unable to provide food and jobs; its final verdict is in line with this thinking. Of course there was no central legislation, or legislation relating specifically to Delhi, that had criminalized begging earlier; but the capital region like several other states had simply used the provisions of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act to treat begging as a criminal activity.

India’s record in this regard even in the twenty-first century is worse than that of England in the seventeenth century where there had been a large increase in the incidence of begging, because of the impact of the process of primitive accumulation of capital. This process had occurred in several different ways, from the “Enclosure Movement” (where common land was simply enclosed and appropriated by the landlords which made petty production unviable and threw out lots of petty producers from their traditional activities) to massive inflation owing to the inflow of precious metals from the Americas (which lowered real wages and made the traditional ways of living impossible for many). Seventeenth century England had developed a dual system to cope with such increase in begging.

A distinction was drawn between those who were able-bodied and therefore could work but did not have jobs, and those, like the elderly and disabled, who were simply unable to work. For the former there were “work-houses” where they were provided with raw materials and made to work, while the latter were provided with relief in their places of residence by taxing those local residents who were “able to pay”. It is estimated that by 1776 as many as 100000 paupers were housed in work-houses across England and Wales, and that, additionally, by the end of the century as many as a million persons were getting poverty relief at the local level. These two figures put together would amount perhaps to more than 10 percent of the total population of England and Wales at the time. This is a measure as much of the devastation caused by primitive accumulation of capital in the development of capitalism, as of the fact that such devastation was also accompanied by a measure of relief to the destitute even under developing capitalism in metropolitan economies.

In societies like ours however where the main instrument of primitive accumulation historically had been the colonial processes of “drain of wealth” and “deindustrialization”, the millions that became destitute could get no relief of any kind. This was not only the root of modern mass poverty in our society, i.e. of poverty associated with insecurity and unrelated either to natural calamities or to the prevailing levels of labour productivity in society, but also the progenitor of large-scale begging even by able-bodied persons.

Post-independence capitalist development under the dirigiste regime made little impact on the levels of such destitution. Instead of carrying out any significant land redistribution which might have mitigated such destitution, it actually entailed evictions of share-croppers and tenants-at-will by landlords interested in taking to “junker”-style capitalist farming in the new context. In the neo-liberal era, primitive accumulation of capital through the encroachment by the capitalist sector upon traditional petty production has got a huge fillip; and this has further enhanced the scale of destitution.

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