The Delhi Games

SOYMB has described the current South Africa World Cup as a sporting circus for the promotion of national prestige but lets not forget that also later this year another jamboree will be taking place - the 2010 October Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India.

In South Africa we saw the homeless and the squatters and the street traders being re-located. In Delhi , they are sending back beggars found on the streets to the towns and villages from which they migrated. Firm about dealing with the “social menace”, the government has formed 13 teams to round up beggars and declared 12 “zero-tolerance zones”. Mobile courts are already in operation to prosecute beggars and more are on the way .

The goal of making Delhi shine as the show-case city has led to the construction of flyovers, development of a metro rail system, street-scaping, and the renovation of prominent markets. Slums have been cleared and dhabas that dotted the lanes of Delhi removed. The result is a stark rise in the number of homeless people. The burden of hosting the Commonwealth Games has fallen on the city's poor.

According to the Social Welfare Department, Delhi has an estimated 60,000 beggars. A study by the Centre for Media Studies, Delhi, found that around 90 per cent of the beggars in Delhi were migrants from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, pushed to the national capital by poverty.

Delhi's Social Welfare Minister Mangat Ram Singhal has invoked the Bombay Prevention of Beggary Act, 1959, which criminalises begging which was not enforced until two years ago.The Act prescribes punishment up to 10 years for a person found begging. It bans begging, vending on roads, cleaning vehicles at traffic junctions, singing for money in buses and displaying physical disability to seek alms. A person penalised under the Bombay Act is sent to a special “beggar court” or is tried by the mobile courts. These courts have suddenly become active under the Delhi government's initiative to remove anyone found vending, squatting or sleeping on the streets, railway stations, bus stops or any other public places.

Harsh Mander, a social activist said the poor feared police high-handedness. “It's like a war against the poor” .

The civil rights groups Housing and Land Rights Network says there is rampant exploitation of workers at the Commonwealth Games construction sites, which includes low pay, inadequate living conditions and lack of safety equipment.Tens of thousands of rural migrants have also been brought in for construction work, but civil rights activists say they have documented "widespread rights violations" at building sites.

“The scale of the Games and the excessive costs involved are hard to justify in a country that has glaringly high levels of poverty, hunger, inequality, homelessness and malnutrition. When one of three Indians lives below the poverty line and 40 per cent of the world's hungry live in India, when 46 per cent of India's children and 55 per cent of its women are malnourished, does spending thousands of crores of rupees on a 12-day sports event build national pride,” said Shivani Chaudhry, associate co-ordinator of HLRN.