LAHORE: The Lahore Traffic Police have launched a pilot project for the rehabilitation of beggars and their placement in dignified employment, with scrutiny of the first 10 families now complete, according to an official statement issued by the office of Chief Traffic Officer (CTO) Lahore Syed Abdul Raheem Shirazi.
Under the initiative, beggars will be provided professional training, employment and facilities to set up small businesses in collaboration with Small Industries. The Punjab Small Industries Corporation will provide selected individuals with easy loans of Rs 500,000 each to establish a business of their own.
The CTO’s office said work is also being taken forward on establishing “jhonpri schools” — schools inside the makeshift settlements that exist across Lahore — for the rehabilitation of children currently on the streets.
Contacts are continuing with various organisations to teach skills to women and children among the most deserving and most vulnerable families, in partnership with welfare bodies. Beauty courses and tailoring and embroidery training will be arranged for transgender beggars and women through welfare organisations.
With the help of volunteers from the Al-Khidmat Foundation, the mapping, research and profiling of beggars is under way to build a picture of who is on the streets, where, and why.
The stated purpose of the project is to move deserving individuals away from begging and towards a dignified and self-reliant life. The statement said such measures would play an important role in ending professional begging and in social rehabilitation, adding that effective steps must be taken to check the day-by-day increase in the number of beggars.
Lahore Traffic Police have taken action against more than 4,500 beggars during the current year.
The design of the pilot draws a line between two groups often treated as one: individuals begging out of destitution, and organised networks that deploy people — frequently children, women and transgender persons — on roads and intersections and take a cut of the proceeds. Enforcement alone tends to move the first group from one intersection to another without changing anything, which is why profiling and family-level scrutiny sit at the front of this project rather than at the end.
The Rs 500,000 loan component is the part most likely to be tested in practice. Micro-enterprise support of that size can genuinely change a household’s income, but it also requires that recipients have somewhere to trade, a workable business idea and enough follow-up support to survive the first year.
Ten families is a deliberately small starting cohort. The relevant questions as the project scales are how families are selected, whether children entering jhonpri schools transition into mainstream schooling, and what happens to loan recipients twelve months in. If the pilot’s profiling data is published, it would also give Lahore its first structured picture of who is actually begging on the city’s roads.
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