Migration has always been driven by aspiration. People move because they believe that life elsewhere offers greater dignity, security and economic possibility than the place they leave behind. Sometimes migration is driven by opportunity. Sometimes by desperation. Often, it is driven by both.
For decades, many Goans of Indo-Portuguese ancestry used Portuguese citizenship rights to migrate to the United Kingdom before Brexit. The objective was not merely relocation. It was upward mobility. The attraction was clear: access to a stronger labour market, better wages, welfare support, educational opportunity and the promise of a more secure future.
The economics were simple. The pound sterling offered purchasing power and social mobility that local opportunities could not easily match. Many migrant Goans worked multiple jobs, accepted hardship and built lives through sacrifice. They migrated with a clear intention: To integrate into a productive economy and improve their family’s long-term prospects.
European Union mobility rights allowed Portuguese passport holders to move and settle lawfully in the United Kingdom before Brexit, with access to employment and, in many circumstances, social support systems. Migration in that sense was aspirational, lawful and productive.
Goa and the new
migration reality
Goa today is experiencing its own migration pressures. People from neighbouring states increasingly move to it in search of livelihood, opportunity and economic security. Many arrive with skill, labour and enterprise. They work in construction, transport, domestic service, hospitality and countless sectors that contribute to Goa’s economy.
This form of migration is neither unusual nor objectionable. Labour mobility is part of economic growth. But not all migration produces productive integration.
A troubling pattern has emerged on Goa’s roads, junctions and traffic signals. Increasingly, one encounters migrant families using children as instruments of public sympathy. Infants are carried in arms. Young children approach vehicles. Adolescents are seen vending or begging in dangerous traffic conditions. This is structured vulnerability.
Line between survival
and exploitation
There is a critical distinction between migration for work and migration that normalises dependency through child exploitation. A worker who migrates to Goa to provide labour participates in an exchange of economic value. Labour is provided. Remuneration is earned. The migrant family seeks survival through contribution.
But where adults use children to generate sympathy-based income through begging, the moral and legal equation changes completely. The child ceases to be protected as a dependent family member and instead becomes an economic tool.
The uncomfortable truth is that the visible suffering of the child becomes the mechanism through which income is generated. This raises difficult questions.
Are these children receiving education? Are they receiving healthcare? Are they being protected from abuse? Or are they being conditioned into a cycle of intergenerational exploitation?
The constitutional duty
to protect children
India’s Constitution does not permit indifference to such exploitation. Article 21 guarantees the right to live with dignity. Article 21A recognises the fundamental right to education for children between 6 and 14 years. Article 24 prohibits the exploitation of children in hazardous environments.
The use of children for begging directly conflicts with these constitutional guarantees.The statutory framework is equally clear.
Section 76 of the criminalises cruelty towards children, including conduct that causes unnecessary physical or mental suffering. Section 81 addresses sale and procurement of children for exploitative purposes. The legislative intent is unmistakable: children cannot be reduced to instruments of economic gain.
The legislation also recognises the State’s obligation to protect children from abuse, neglect and exploitation. This is precisely why the issue cannot be framed merely as migration. It is fundamentally a child protection issue.
Goans are compassionate people. That compassion is deeply embedded in the social fabric of this State. But compassion must not become complicity.
Giving money at traffic junctions may provide immediate emotional relief to the giver. Yet in many cases, it reinforces the very economic model that keeps children on the streets.
If child presence generates income, the incentive to remove the child from the street diminishes.This is the difficult truth policymakers must confront. The answer lies in targeted state intervention: rescue, rehabilitation, education, family counselling, inter-state coordination and strict enforcement against organised child exploitation.
Repatriation as a
lawful solution
Rescue alone cannot solve the problem of child begging. The real challenge lies in preventing rescued children from being returned to the same cycle of exploitation.
Section 76(2) of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 recognises liability against persons having charge or control of a child who permit that child to be used for begging. Section 8(2) of the Goa Children’s Act, 2003 similarly addresses child abuse and economic exploitation. The Goa, Daman and Diu Prevention of Begging Act, 1972 further provides statutory machinery for intervention and rehabilitation.
Where children are found to have been brought into Goa from other States for begging, interstate repatriation should form part of the legal solution.
Each rescued child must first be produced before the Child Welfare Committee for inquiry into identity, domicile, trafficking indicators and parental complicity. If the family itself is exploitative, automatic restoration would defeat child protection law.
Only where safe and in the child’s best interests should repatriation proceed through coordinated interstate supervision. Where repatriation is unsafe, Goa must assume full responsibility for protection, education and rehabilitation.
Goa must decide
what it tolerates
Migration is not the problem. Exploitation is. Goa has always welcomed people seeking honest opportunity. But no society can permit vulnerable children to become economic instruments in the name of survival. The real question is not whether migrants belong in Goa.
The real question is whether Goa is prepared to draw a firm line when migration becomes a vehicle for child exploitation. A civilised society is ultimately judged not by how it treats wealth, privilege or power, but by how firmly it protects those who cannot protect themselves. No child’s future should begin at a traffic signal.
