‘29,403 beggars rounded up in Kabul’

KABUL (Pajhwok): Nearly 29,500 beggars have been rounded up in Kabul City since the start of the process,  majority of them were professional beggars who change their begging technics over the period, an official said on Tuesday.

The process to round up beggars in Kabul City kicked off on August 13, 2022 and was still underway.

Total 29,403 beggars, including 12,459 women and 13,020 children, rounded up from different parts of capital Kabul until the end of February, according to the information from the prime minister’s economic aide office.

The source said 40 percent of these individuals deserved to be entitled to get assistance while nearly 60 percent of them were professional beggars.

Maulavi Nazar Mohammad Nasiri, member of the Commission tasked to round up beggars, told Pajhwok Afghan News, six months after the launch beggars rounding up operation still some people could be seen in parts of the city begging because they became habitual to this practice.

Nasiri said, some the beggars are addicted to begging, for instance: “The band of Joogi and Jatt tribes are accustomed to begging … they set near Shaheed, Sarai Shamali and Chahar Qambar square of Kabul city, they confess that this type of life is their nature, they say that they do not want to sit in their houses because they are professional beggars”.

He continued: “The beggars who are not entitled to get aid would not lose this habit, thus we arranged prison for them where they would be taught by two teachers in the morning to encourage them to go to madrasa and in the afternoon Ulema will be tasked to change their mindset and educate them.”

While Shareef Sharafat, a member of beggars’ roundup committee and the head of logistics department of the Ministry of Work and Social Affairs also pointed to the habit of some beggars and added, professional beggars are those beggars who are capable to work and win the bread of their daily life, but they do not work, they just keep begging.

The begging has become a custom and habit for some people, some of them even have land for cultivation and their children already work on their land but they continue to beg, he said.

Sharafat said, since the roundup process, some of the beggars changed their method of begging.

He said: “What has driven our attention are some of the activities similar to begging, like smoking pecan, wiping the glasses of cars while some other sell pens on the streets and collect money from the people at the same time, we decided to add such people to the beggars’ roundup process as well”.

Hundreds of such professional and non-entitled of aid packages, these beggars came back on the streets, as their biometrics were registered, they were identified and punished for this action, he added.

Sharafat said: “Those beggars who were really poor and deserved assistance, each one of them were given 2,000 afs monthly pay”.

While some of them were introduced to other welfare organization to get permanent packages of aid.

He said, 70 of those children who were collected during the beggars’ roundup process were sent to orphanages while 500 of some other beggars’ families were introduced to some bakeries to get their daily dry bread packages.

Aw/nh