Beggars’ homes are treated worse than prisons and run like ‘discretionary charity’ by State: SC judgment

The Supreme Court has held in a judgment that beggars’ homes are neither quasi-penal facilities nor “discretionary charity” run by the State. Their role must be restorative.

A Bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan, in a September 12 judgment published on Sunday (September 14, 2025), said the poor in beggars’ homes are deprived of the even basic constitutional protections afforded to convicts in prisons.

The term “home” denotes safety, dignity, belonging, and care. They should be conceived by the state as centres of recovery, skill-building and reintegration into society.

“Any arrangement that degenerates into a prison-like environment — characterised by overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, arbitrary or involuntary confinement, denial of medical treatment, neglect of mental health needs, or restrictions on personal liberty — is not merely a policy failure, but a constitutional infraction striking at the very heart of Article 21 (right to life),” Justice Mahadevan, who authored the judgment, observed.

The apex court held that beggars’ homes was a “constitutional trust”, and a manifestation of the state’s guarantee of the rights to dignity, bodily autonomy, health, shelter, privacy, and humane treatment, with heightened protection for the most vulnerable groups

“If constitutional protections are owed to convicts and undertrials — individuals lawfully deprived of liberty pursuant to criminal conviction or prosecution — a fortiori, they must apply to residents of beggars’ homes, who are not offenders at all. Many are victims of structural poverty, mental illness, abandonment, domestic violence, caste discrimination, or social exclusion,” Justice Mahadevan noted.

Their confinement, if necessary at all, must be in the nature of protective custody accompanied by comprehensive rehabilitation services, rather than coercive detention.

Beggar homes must be recognised as “spaces of social justice”. The failure to ensure humane conditions in them amounted to not merely ‘maladministration’, but a constitutional breach of the fundamental right to life with dignity.

The judgment was based on an outbreak of cholera and gastroenteritis at the beggars’ home, at Narela in Delhi in 2000. Six inmates died and 107 were hospitalised.The outbreak was sourced to contamination of the drinking and cooking water.

The court issued a series of directions to improve the running of beggars’ homes across the country, including mandatory check-ups of individuals within 24 hours of admission; avail the services of a qualified dietician to regularly verify the nutritional standards of food served in these homes; independent third-party infrastructure audit of beggars’ homes at least once every two years; authorities to ensure that occupancy in homes did not exceed the sanctioned capacity in order to prevent overcrowding and the spread of communicable diseases; availability of vocational training; separate facilities for women or children to ensure their privacy, safety, and access to child care, education, and counselling.

The court clarified that children found begging must not be detained in these homes but referred to child welfare institutions under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015.