LAHORE: The City Traffic Police has decided to launch a pilot project for the rehabilitation and reintegration of beggars and for providing them with dignified employment.
On the directions of CTO Lahore Syed Abdul Raheem Sherazi, the scrutiny of the first ten families for the project has been completed.
With the cooperation of the Punjab Small Industries Corporation, selected individuals will be provided vocational training, employment and opportunities to establish small businesses. Deserving individuals will also be provided easy loans of up to Rs500,000 each for starting a business.
The involvement of the Punjab Small Industries Corporation is significant to the design. PSIC operates as a provincial body supporting cottage and small-scale enterprise through training centres, credit facilitation and marketing support, giving the initiative access to an existing institutional infrastructure rather than requiring one to be built from scratch.
Under the project, a proposal to establish “Jhonpri Schools” for the rehabilitation and education of children living in shanty settlements in Lahore is also under consideration.
The proposal addresses what specialists regard as the decisive variable in whether street-based begging persists across generations. Children who spend their days on roadsides rather than in classrooms enter adulthood without literacy or marketable skills, and the pattern reproduces itself. Interventions that reach children where they live, rather than requiring families to navigate formal enrolment procedures, have generally shown better uptake among highly marginalised populations.
In addition, measures are being taken in collaboration with welfare organisations to teach various skills to deserving and extremely vulnerable women and children.
Contacts are also ongoing with welfare organisations for teaching beauty courses, stitching and embroidery, and other skills to transgender beggars and to women.
The specific inclusion of transgender persons reflects the documented reality that the community faces near-total exclusion from formal employment in Pakistan, with begging and related activity often functioning as one of very few available income sources. Skills-based programming targeted at this group addresses a gap that general employment schemes have historically failed to close.
With the assistance of volunteers from the Alkhidmat Foundation, the process of mapping, research and profiling of additional beggars is also ongoing.
Systematic profiling serves an operational purpose beyond record-keeping. It allows authorities to distinguish between individuals begging out of genuine destitution and organised networks that deploy people — including children and persons with disabilities — under coercive arrangements. The two categories require entirely different responses: welfare and rehabilitation in the first case, criminal investigation in the second.
CTO Lahore Syed Abdul Raheem Sherazi said the purpose of the project is to free deserving individuals from begging and bring them toward a dignified and self-sufficient life. He said such measures can play an important role in eliminating professional begging and in social rehabilitation.
The location of the initiative within the traffic police reflects operational reality: the roadsides, signals and intersections where the City Traffic Police maintains permanent deployment are also where street-based begging is most concentrated and most visible.
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