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| Mind-boggling is annual beggar economy | | And it pays to be a beggar in Mumbai | | SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
NEW DELHI, JULY 23: "A beggar cannot be a chooser", is an old saying. But this does not hold water in case of India's financial capital, Mumbai, where beggars earn several times the average income of the majority of Indians.
This information has come from the Maharashtra government. Beggars operating in the poorer areas of Mumbai earn far less. On the other hand, the 13,000 whose pitches are in more affluent areas earn between them an average of Rs 5 million per day.
The majority of Indians barely exceed an annual income of Rs 20,000. The World Bank says that more than a third of the population of 1.2 billion live on less than one US dollar.
The Maharashtra government recently offered to help find Mumbai's beggars a better way to live through the employment guarantee scheme introduced by the Union government. This assures 100 days of guaranteed employment every year in return for just over Rs 600 per month.
Mumbai has the largest slums of any city in Asia. Economists estimate that the city has around 100,000 beggars controlled by crime syndicates. Economists estimate that Mumbai's annual beggar economy is worth about Rs1 billion.
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