A mentally unstable woman from West Bengal was allegedly gang-raped by five men at coastal Baga more than a week back. The woman also alleged that she was again raped at a bus stop in Miramar. While the victim is being treated at the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour, the case is being investigated by the women's police.
The woman, in her statement to the police, disclosed that she had arrived in Goa with a male accomplice who later deserted her. She claimed that she had no money, and was forced to wander the streets and sleep in the open.
Goa is teeming with migrants -- men, women and children -- making the streets and temporary roadside tenements their shelter. These migrants come here to explore avenues of earning a living by taking up jobs, begging or even indulging in the flesh trade.
The dilemma for authorities is that all those who roam the streets or appear shabby and dazed can't be labelled homeless. There are procedures in place, and it would be a Herculean task to identify and initiate a process that leads to shelter homes. For the police, it is always going to be a challenging job to scan through thousands of migrants and identify the homeless, destitute and mentally deranged. On the flip side, in most cases, the victims don't come forth for fear of facing isolation in shelter homes and the prospect of being sent back to their native places.
The fault lies in the lack of control over migrants coming in and those living on the streets, especially women and beggars. Despite the fear of the State's image getting tarnished, government agencies have not woken up to this grim reality, which is probably why the number of child beggars and sex workers has escalated.
The traffic signals that dot the highways have been bustling with children between the age group of 5 and 15 moving between vehicles in the queue, some adults holding newborn babies and going about begging for money. Begging is seen as a nuisance from the tourism standpoint, but why are authorities silent about it? For example, in its recent order, the tourism department has barred beggars and hawkers along beaches but failed to crack the whip despite issuing an explicit order against it.
The news of a gang rape of a Bengali woman at the beach would provide bad publicity for Goa, and her word holds up in the current situation because it is registered as gang rape. The State's helplessness is exposed here.
The police cannot be expected to do a litmus test on every drifting migrant, checking on the 'homeless' status. However, as a State looking to improvise its stature as an upmarket destination, we will have to work out systems to avoid such ugly and embarrassing instances. Migrants entering the State, including children, must be enumerated through a mechanism. Authorities must be aware of persons entering the State, their nature of visit and details about their stay. It's time to look at the broader picture rather than merely crying hoarse over shelter homes.
