An interesting episode which happened to me personally and I thought I would share with my readers. I had gone to the famous Khadda Market in Defence to buy some fruits. While I usually buy all fruits from one of the several shops located there I find the guavas are found best from the street vendors, so I approached such a vendor and selected the fruits I wanted to buy.
All this while there was this tall well-built beggar pestering me to give him some alms and I was ignoring him as I discourage beggars and this one really looked fit and healthy and should have been working somewhere to earn a living. Came time to pay for the fruit and I only had a big note which I offered to the fruit seller. He shook his head and said no he does not have the change for that.
He than looked at the beggar and said “do you have change for this?” And yes believe it or not but he had the change and even the audacity to tell me now that you have change why don’t you give me some money also I am a poor man. I was speechless at such brazen behaviour and just walked away.
The beggar continued to ply his trade in that area and from what I have observed he is a regular at this spot and still manages to solicit alms from people who give alms indiscriminately and without thought.
This incident prompted me to further investigate the beggar situation in Karachi and I was shocked to find how the people of this city are being practically robbed of their hard-earned money by these beggars and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
Apart from grabbing money on one pretext or the other, these beggars are also engaged in crimes, and from reports I have read kidnapping of young children who are then used for begging and the horrible thing is that most of these kidnapped children are deformed by force so they can arouse greater sympathy and earn more money.
The biggest onslaught of these criminals in the form of beggars takes place during the holy month of Ramzan and is at its peek at Eid. An estimated 300,000 professional beggars enter Karachi during this period. It is estimated that this leads to a rise in crime by over 60 percent.
These beggars are not only a source of organised crime in Pakistan but also tarnish the image of Pakistan abroad and specially in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia deported 24,000 Pakistanis this year alone on allegations of begging while Dubai sent back around 6,000 individuals on charges of begging.
The shameful aspect of this is that these individuals carry on their activities in the holy places and come up with false stories like having lost their money while praying and now have no money to even buy a decent meal.
Pakistani beggars when caught are deported and in some cases imprisoned in Middle Eastern countries but they go scot-free in Pakistan and the surprising thing is that they operate in broad daylight on the main thoroughfares of the country without anyone apprehending them.
Many of these beggars are underage and supervised by elderly handlers, and surely it is a crime to use children for begging, but there is no action against them even though this crime occurs in broad daylight on busy thoroughfares and in many cases within a stone’s throw of the law enforcing agencies.
It will not be wrong to say that at nearly every roundabout in a metropolitan city like Karachi there are police pickets at every other roundabout complemented by hordes of beggars of all ages some of them even carrying new born babies to add power to their message.
At many of the traffic lights these young beggars also attempt to clean your windshields with dirty water actually creating a mess and no amount of pleading from the drivers affects them. Many people are forced to give them money just to keep them away thus saving their windshields.
Only recently, there was a campaign in DHA Karachi, urging residents not to give alms to beggars. Posters were pasted at most roundabouts. Not that it prevented the beggars from still thronging to traffic signals or the people to dish out money. The posters torn and tattered still flutter in the air while beggars happily go about their business .Begging is here to stay.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a well-known columnist