Apparently, being poor in India is not enough. Raghavan and Tarique (2018) have brought to light a very important issue which is new to me and its shocking that such law even exists in India. According to the World Bank Infographic on India’s poverty profile 1 in 5 Indians were poor in 2012 and so making laws that make their lives difficult is not a solution. The map below shows that majority of the states and union territories in India have an Anti-Begging law.
Is your state one of them? Is it justified ?

Data:
The data for the tile map is sourced from blogpost. I have used the data available on the blog and added a dummy column which 1 if there exist an anti-beging law and 0 otherwise. The data i have used is available here.
Shapefiles:
Readers would also need a shapefile of India to replicate this map. To learn to use shapefile in R , please refer to my previous blog posts .
Code:
library(gridExtra) library(viridis) library(geogrid) # for the grid/tile map library(dplyr) library(stringr) # clean and transform shape file and literacy rate data original_shapes <- read_polygons("india\\IND_adm1.shp") # shape file df <- read.csv("stateacts.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE) %>% select(region,dummy) df[,1] <- sapply(df[,1],str_to_title) original_shapes$NAME_1 %in% df$region df[which(df[,1]=="Andaman And Nicobar Islands"),1] <- "A & N Islands" df[which(df[,1]=="Dadra And Nagar Haveli"),1] <- "D & N Haveli" df[which(df[,1]=="Delhi"),1] <- "Delhi (UT)" df[which(df[,1]=="Daman And Diu"),1] <- "Daman & Diu" df[which(df[,1]=="Orissa"),1] <- "Odisha" df[which(df[,1]=="Uttaranchal"),1] <- "Uttarakhand" df[which(df[,1]=="Jammu And Kashmir"),1] <- "Jammu & Kashmir" original_shapes$NAME_1 %in% df$region colnames(df) <- c("NAME_1", "dummy") original_shapes@data <- left_join(original_shapes@data, df , by="NAME_1") # Create a choropleth map: clean <- function(shape) { shape@data$id = rownames(shape@data) shape.points = fortify(shape, region="id") shape.df = merge(shape.points, shape@data, by="id") } result_df_raw <- clean(original_shapes) rawplot <- ggplot(result_df_raw) + geom_polygon(aes(x = long, y = lat, fill = dummy, group = group)) + coord_equal() + scale_fill_viridis(option = "magma", direction = -1) + guides(fill = FALSE) + theme_void() rawplot # generates the map # seed 1 new_cells_reg <- calculate_grid(shape = original_shapes, grid_type = "regular", seed = 1) resultreg <- assign_polygons(original_shapes, new_cells_reg) result_df_reg <- clean(resultreg) regplot <- ggplot(result_df_reg) + geom_polygon(aes(x = long, y = lat, fill = dummy, group = group)) + geom_text(aes(V1, V2, label = ABB), size = 4, color = "white") + coord_equal() + scale_color_viridis(discrete = TRUE, option="D") + guides(fill = FALSE) + labs(x = NULL, y = NULL, title = "States with Anti Begging Laws", caption="@opendataandr", subtitle = "Source: https: //blog.ipleaders.in/anti-begging/")+ theme_minimal()+ theme( text = element_text(family = "Ubuntu Regular", color = "#22211d"), axis.line = element_blank(), axis.text.x = element_blank(), axis.text.y = element_blank(), axis.ticks = element_blank(), axis.title.x = element_blank(), axis.title.y = element_blank(), panel.grid.major = element_blank(), panel.grid.minor = element_blank(), plot.background = element_rect(fill = "#f5f5f2", color = NA), panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#f5f5f2", color = NA), legend.background = element_rect(fill = "#f5f5f2", color = NA), panel.border = element_blank() ) regplot
References:
- Vijay, Raghavan & Mohammed Tarique : “Penalising Poverty :
The Case of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959 “, Vol. 53, Issue No. 22, 02 Jun, 2018 .