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Indian beggars learn English to target tourists

Indian beggars are learning English at makeshift language schools so they can target tourists visiting the country for next year's Commonwealth Games.

Currently, thousands of beggars who ply their trade at Delhi's road junctions read from a set script.

In broken English they plead: "No mummy no pappy, no chapati, ten rupees."

But now, according to some of the gangmasters who control them they are studying foreign languages to cash-in during the Games.

They have forecast a major windfall if they can tell more heart-rending stories in clear English and other European languages to appeal to the more than 100,000 foreigners expected to visit.

In a poor west Delhi slum, beggar children with dirty bare feet, torn T-shirts and matted hair, learn new phrases they hope will melt the hearts of unsuspecting tourists who do not realise they are part of the city's vast organised crime network.

So while most of them have had little or no formal schooling, they are now learning how to say: "I am an orphan, I have not eaten for days, I am ill, have no money for medicine, please help me in the name of God."

Their "leader", Vijay Babli, who claims to be the head of 1,200 beggar families who sleep on the city's streets, said the rewards could be substantial.

"More than one lakh (100,000) foreigners will be in the city during the period. Even if one beggar earns 150-200 rupees per day (£2 – £2.80), you can understand the turnover for us," he said.

According to "tutors" at the makeshift school in "Lal Quarter", in west Delhi's Rohini area, one eight-year-old-girl had learnt Spanish, French and English, while lessons wee also given in how to identify different countries' bank notes in various denominations.

There will be greater barriers than language, however, in their campaign to cash-in. The Delhi government is using the Games, set for October 2010, to showcase not just the transformation of the city, but India as an increasingly powerful and developed country.

They are hoping to complete their ambitious, modern overhead Metro system, upgrade roads pavements, and show-off state of the art sports facilities.

They are determined that the city's beggars will not be allowed to present the kind of India seen in the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.

It will be a challenge.

The city's major road junctions are overrun with wretched women carrying babies, often drugged to sleep, occasionally rented as props, who bang empty milk bottles on drivers' windows.

Multiple amputees scratch at doors from improvised trolleys on the road below, while circus performers tumble in and out of weaving traffic.

Special courts have been established to target the beggars and move them out of the city centre to "beggar homes" on the outskirts, where tourists will not see them.