In a welcome and profoundly pragmatic move, the latest census framework has opted to drop the archaic and separate classification of “beggars and vagrants” from its questionnaire. This is sound reasoning of the highest order.
After all, a Viksit Bharat has no conceptual or structural place for beggars; thus, refusing to codify them into statistical permanence is the first step toward administrative manifestation. Already, they stand diminished, less than five lakhs, an insignificant number, almost.
To be sure, casual observers might point to those figures still lingering at traffic intersections, hovering like persistent flies outside high-gloss glass facades of posh restaurants, where vigilant ushers swiftly shoo them away before they can offend the appetites of the diners.
But let us be clear: they are merely statistical aberrations, transient blips in an otherwise soaring narrative of national progress. Indeed, the government should take this creative bureaucratic logic a step further in this census.
If an airbrush can neatly dissolve an inconvenient category, why stop there? Imagine its application to other systemic frictions: the phenomenon of disguised unemployment, where citizens cleverly adapt to climate and architecture by sleeping under the stars on balmy nights whenever the weather permits and wherever else they can manage to crawl into when it doesn't.
Employment Reality
To understand why these structural adjustments matter, one must confront the harsher backdrop against which the nation’s employment landscape is viewed.
Consider the recurring spectacle of mass berozgari that periodically paralyses states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar or the seismic stampedes witnessed during Indian Railways recruitment drives.
When lakhs of applicants, including hundreds of thousands holding advanced engineering degrees, management diplomas, and postgraduate qualifications, flood recruitment portals for a handful of menial, blue-collar support roles, it reveals a profound market imbalance.
This is the greater reality against which we should view any rash of protests or murmurs of discontent: a hyper-competitive vacuum, where the drop from a graduate desk-job aspirant to plain, unadorned destitution is terrifyingly steep and sudden with no easy stops in between.
After all, a nation cannot easily absorb millions of overqualified youth into low-level manual tracks without scraping raw nerves. Yet, despair is antithetical to our current trajectory.
Perhaps, by some stroke of magical economic realignment by the year 2047—when artificial intelligence has seamlessly taken over a substantial portion of human labour and we stand triumphantly viksit—these modern-day employment anxieties and survival categories will dissolve entirely.
They will retain no more than a vague historical value, sinking comfortably below the status of a mere academic footnote. Who knows? By then, begging might even evolve into a recognised, digitised gig-economy employment means. Until that utopian horizon arrives, we must tidy our datasets and march forward. Without beggars, of course.
