THE WORLD - News from May 17, 2009

After her husband left and monsoon rains washed away her straw hut, Rowshan Ara felt she had no choice but to head to Bangladesh’s teeming capital.

Now, she and her two small children survive in Dhaka by begging, among countless panhandlers crowding the city’s broken pavement and traffic-clogged streets.

But Bangladesh’s young government last month ordered a crackdown on begging in public places, imperiling the livelihoods of Ara and tens of thousands of others who make up the poorest of the poor. The law carries a maximum sentence of three months in jail.

“How will I survive if I can’t beg?” Ara asks.

She worked briefly as a housemaid, but she left that job because employers didn’t want her children around and she had nowhere else to leave them. For a time, she says, she sold her body on the streets, but she refuses to return to that life.

“Now, I beg,” she says from her sidewalk post outside the country’s glitziest shopping mall. “It’s given me a chance to always keep my kids with me.”

She earns an average of $2.20 a day, enduring long hours in the brutal sun and making just enough to get by. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she’s forced from the streets.

Details on the implementation of the law are still being negotiated, and it’s unclear when authorities will begin the crackdown, says Mir Md. Aslam, a spokesman for the Ministry of Social Welfare.

The government, which came to power in January, aims to eliminate begging completely within five years, says Finance Minister A.M.A. Muhith. It’s an ambitious goal in one of the world’s poorest countries, and many critics say it is impossible.

Bangladesh’s economy has grown by a steady 6% annually in recent years, and Muhith hopes the country can share the recent prosperity enjoyed by India. The World Bank said in November that the percentage of Bangladeshi people living on less than $1 a day had been reduced to 40% from 49% in 2000.

There are no official figures about the number of beggars in Bangladesh. But numbers from independent researcher Pravash Chandra Das, who now works for Grameen Bank, show that Dhaka, a city of 10 million, has about 100,000 beggars.

Beggars are everywhere in Bangladesh: at busy intersections, crowded train stations, college campuses and mosques of every size. Many are physically disabled, and in cities they tap on car windows and ride buses looking for change. In villages, they go door to door hoping for alms.

Some critics cheer the government’s hard line against beggars.

“They create public nuisance,” says Zahedul Islam, who works at a public relations firm in Dhaka. “When I see kids running after a Westerner and touching his clothes and asking for alms, I feel embarrassed. It’s a shame for the nation.”

Bangladesh is plagued with devastating annual monsoons, a history of corrupt governments and a vast rural population without access to healthcare or education. The poor, experts say, live perpetually on the brink of disaster.

“They are trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty,” said Qazi Kholiquzzaman, an economist with the Bangladesh Development Council. “They are poor, and every year they become poorer, and many of them slowly end up as beggars just to survive.”

Kholiquzzaman said the government’s ban would not work, and called for authorities to instead increase development programs for the 25 million poorest people.

Grameen Bank, a small credit agency founded by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, launched a program to loan money to beggars in installments sometimes as small as 3 cents. Since the program began in 2002, 108,000 beggars have received loans, Das said.

He said about 16,000 beggars had stopped begging and were earning money doing odd jobs in the areas where they once used to beg.

“Such steps could yield positive results in stamping out the begging problem,” he says. “If we can stamp out begging in the future, it will ensure a face-lift for the country.”

The program works with beggars only in rural areas, and does not cover Dhaka or Chittagong, the second-largest city.

Ara says she hopes to be able to stop begging, but she sees no other option for her family.

“Please don’t throw me out of the streets,” she says. “It’s my home now.”