Having said that, there is a very fine distinction between the right and the ideal. Although the belief that giving alms in cash to beggars promotes beggary and in turn incentivizes people to not work is not completely fallacious, however, it should also be noted that (most) people beg on the streets not because they wish to, but because they need to. It is their last resort to subsistence. We have to bear the guilt of not helping someone who is extremely underprivileged (even after the average Indian citizen paying almost a third of her income as tax!) just because: there aren’t enough jobs for those people who are often thought of as society’s “parasites”, there isn’t much awareness about the implications of beggary and the legal instruments that could help the beggars help themselves (to say the least). These underprivileged homeless people are also somewhere at fault, because, in most cases, it happens that they try to bring in a lot of children into the world, in the hope that they’re “earning” potential breadwinners, however, the sad truth being, that they often unintentionally add to the family’s liabilities, at least for the next 16–18 years. This stockpiling of children is, in a way, an outgrowth of the dysfunctional social security institutions in India.

The best, or rather, the “most feasible” thing for any person to do is to give these people food, clothing, or any helpful thing in kind. This might seem like a very obvious solution on the face of it, however, very few people, when they leave home, care to take an extra fruit or a breakfast bar for the homeless beggars and eunuchs. Nevertheless, this is undeniably just another way of supplying them with a small proportion of items they need for subsistence.

Empowering someone is the greatest gift amongst all. And empowering someone doesn’t always imply making the person “fight-ready”. Imparting even the most basic knowledge to a person who can use it to make her life better and more meaningful, indeed counts as “empowerment”. We could just take the rudimentary steps of “advising” the homeless to try to get their legal documents in place, which could undeniably help them avail benefits of government schemes they aren’t even aware of. The pantomaths amongst us could maybe make them aware of the implications of beggary, and the rights they can exercise, without being afraid of harassment or “punishment”.

Thus far, the conclusion I have been able to safely draw is that there exists no well-defined solution for the layman to help ameliorate beggary in India unless there is the government involved (literally speaking). Penalizing and criminalizing begging, harassing the homeless, in my opinion, would not really help in shaping up a “New India”.

After all, merely removing the “disgraceful” things from the forefront, wouldn’t help us clean the mess we’ve created so callously.