Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Indian City Jails Beggars Before Ivanka’s Visit

The Indian city of Hyderabad is rounding up and jailing beggars before it hosts an international conference at which First Daughter Ivanka Trump will lead the American delegation.

Nearly 400 beggars were picked up and sent to a “rehabilitation center” at the Chanchalguda Jail, the Indian Express reported. The city’s police commissioner has banned all begging on city streets until January, and expects to round up around 6,000 homeless people in total.

“Some beggars argued that we were taking their freedom to live anywhere they want but we told them it was for their own good because they are going to the rehab center where they will be taken care of,” an official told the Express.

George Rakesh Babu, founder of the local homeless charity Good Samaritans, told The Washington Post that “The preparations are happening in every corner of our city. But the prison capacity in Hyderabad is not enough to look after all these people.” He noted that the central jail’s maximum capacity was only 1,000.

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad, which The Washington Post referred to as “India’s Silicon Valley,” will begin November 28.

The theme of the summit is “Women First” and has the tagline “Prosperity for All.”

Similar roundups of undesirables took place in Hyderabad when then-U.S. President Bill Clinton visited in 2000, the Express noted.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.