Daily Times

Addressing complaints by foreign countries, the federal government has decided to criminalise begging by amending the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018.

The interior ministry has submitted the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons (Amendment) Bill, 2024, aimed at tweaking the existing legislation by adding “organised beggary” to its Section 3.

The proposed changes to the relevant act come as the issue of begging has been raised by multiple countries with Pakistan’s diplomatic missions in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, Iraq and Malaysia also confirming it.

Noting that Pakistanis who visit these countries Hajj, Umrah, and other religious pilgrimages have been found involved in begging, the diplomatic missions, as claimed by the amendment draft, have urged Pakistani authorities to take stern action against those involved in begging and the gangs behind them.

“The agents and gangs who are involved in this practice easily dodge prosecution as beggary is not a crime in any law entrusted to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). The sensitivity of the issue demands an urgent need to make beggary a crime,” reads the draft introduced in the upper house on January 28.

The proposed amendments further expands on “organised beggary” saying that it includes “an act of a person to allure, entice or coerce a person intentionally, knowingly, by use of force, fraud or without fraudulent intention to indulge or to be indulged in soliciting or receiving alms directly, indirectly or on any pretext”.

It also criminalises soliciting or receiving of alms “in a public place, whether or not, under any pretence, such as fortune-telling, performing tricks, selling articles or frequently by knocking at the window panes of vehicles waiting on signals or sometimes forcefully cleaning the windscreen of vehicles in order to seek alms”.

The tweaks further say that people having no visible means of subsistence and wandering about or remaining in any public place in such condition or manner which raises a presumption that the person doing so subsists by soliciting or receiving alms are also to be fall within the ambit of organised beggary along with those who enter any private premises for the purposes of soliciting or receiving alms.

The definition also covers people who exhibit with the object of obtaining or extorting alms, any sore, wound, injury, deformity or disease, whether of a human being or of an animal or allows oneself to be used as an exhibit for the purpose of soliciting or receiving alms.