Written by Faisal CK for The New Indian Express

On September 12, the Supreme Court, in M.S. Patter v. State of NCT of Delhi [2025 INSC 1115], drew attention to one of the most invisible corners of Indian governance — the beggars’ home. The court refused to view such institutions as quasi-penal facilities or as discretionary charity. Instead, it insisted that they must function as restorative spaces designed for recovery, skill-building, and reintegration into society.

The judgment is remarkable for two reasons.

First, it exposes a paradox: while prisons, which house convicted offenders, are constitutionally obliged to safeguard dignity, beggars’ homes—which house non-offenders—often fail to meet even those minimal standards.

Second, it reaffirms the centrality of the dignity clause, anchored in both the Preamble and Article 21 of the Constitution, as the lodestar for state action.

The court further directed that all beggars’ homes across the country must maintain data on deaths caused by negligence, lack of basic facilities, or failure to provide timely medical care. In such cases, the State or Union Territory would be responsible for paying “reasonable compensation” to the next of kin of the deceased. Where warranted, criminal proceedings could also be initiated against those responsible.

These directions stemmed from a tragic incident at the beggars’ home in Lampur, Delhi, in 2000, where contamination of drinking and cooking water with coliform bacteria caused an outbreak of cholera and gastroenteritis. Multiple deaths and widespread illness exposed serious lapses in sanitation, hygiene, and healthcare facilities.

The court held that beggars’ homes must undergo a paradigm shift—from being instruments of social control to becoming spaces of social justice. It stressed: “The failure to ensure humane conditions in such homes does not merely amount to maladministration; it constitutes a constitutional breach of the fundamental right to life with dignity.”

Homes, not prisons

The court’s key observation was stark: “Any arrangement that degenerates into a prison-like environment—characterised by overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, arbitrary 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.”

It also recognised the unique vulnerability of residents in such homes: they are not criminals but victims of abandonment, structural poverty, mental illness, caste discrimination, or domestic violence. Their confinement, if necessary at all, must therefore be protective rather than coercive.

The court’s directions—compulsory medical check-ups within 24 hours of admission, oversight by qualified dieticians, and adherence to sanctioned capacity—translate the abstract principle of dignity into concrete obligations.

Beggars and a dignitarian Constitution

The Preamble to the Indian Constitution promises to secure to all citizens “justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual.” The framers consciously placed dignity at the heart of the constitutional project.

Dignity was not explicitly mentioned in the original text of Article 21, which guarantees that “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” Yet, through judicial interpretation, dignity has become its essence.

In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India [(1978) 1 SCC 248], the court held that “procedure established by law” must be “just, fair and reasonable.”

This transformative reading opened the door for dignity to be read into Article 21. Subsequently, in Francis Coralie Mullin v. Union Territory of Delhi [(1981) 1 SCC 608], Justice P.N. Bhagwati declared that the right to life includes the right to live with dignity and “all that goes along with it,” including adequate nutrition, clothing, shelter, and facilities for reading, writing, and self-expression.

Against this jurisprudential backdrop, the present judgment extends the same protection to beggars’ homes, firmly placing them within the dignity framework. Their residents’ claims are not to charity, but to a constitutional entitlement.

Not a Mr Bumble State

Literature often anticipates jurisprudence by dramatizing social cruelty. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838) immortalises the horrors of the English Poor Law system. Under the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the destitute were confined in “workhouses” where conditions were deliberately harsher than life outside, so that only the truly desperate would seek refuge.

Oliver’s iconic plea for “more” gruel exposes the starvation-level rations imposed on children. The thin porridge symbolised the systemic humiliation of the poor. When Oliver, driven by hunger, dares to ask for more, he is met not with compassion but with outrage. Mr Bumble, the pompous beadle, castigates him as a dangerous ingrate, declaring the boy’s request a heinous affront to authority.

The episode mirrors the suspicion society casts upon the poor: that they are undeserving, lazy, and in need of discipline. Dickens lays bare how charity, when institutionalised without empathy, degenerates into cruelty.

The Supreme Court’s warning echoes Dickens’ critique. A beggars’ home that degenerates into a prison-like environment is no different from Dickens’ workhouse: both betray the very notion of “home” as a place of safety and belonging.

Constitutional compassion

One of the most powerful lines in the judgment is its recognition that beggars are “not offenders at all.” This distinction is crucial. Poverty is not crime, and destitution is not delinquency. Yet, institutions like beggars’ homes often blur this line, criminalising poverty by subjecting its victims to carceral regimes.

Here the court’s reasoning aligns with Francis Coralie Mullin. Just as prisoners— who are lawfully deprived of liberty—are entitled to live with dignity, a fortiori those who are not offenders must be guaranteed equal, if not greater, safeguards. If convicts retain dignity, then surely the indigent, guilty of no crime, cannot be stripped of it.

The court’s insistence on treating confinement in beggars’ homes as “protective custody” rather than “coercive detention” reflects the shift from colonial to constitutional governance. Colonial regimes, like the Victorian workhouse or India’s colonial vagrancy laws, treated the poor as dangerous elements needing control. A constitutional democracy, by contrast, must view them as vulnerable citizens needing care.

Both Aakash Singh Rathore and Ananya Vajpeyi emphasise that Ambedkar placed dignity at the heart of India’s constitutional design. Rathore, in Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India (2020), describes the Preamble as embodying “constitutional compassion” — an ethic that transforms the state’s relationship with its weakest citizens from one of domination to one of care. As he observes: “The Constitution is Ambedkar’s ethical charter, where compassion for the oppressed is not sentiment but structure, not charity but constitutional duty.”

Similarly, Ananya Vajpeyi in Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (2014), notes that Ambedkar regarded dignity as the “grammar of citizenship,” without which the Republic would collapse into hierarchy and humiliation. For him, “dignity was the very currency of democracy,” the promise that even those at the margins of society would be treated with respect. The Supreme Court’s insistence that beggars’ homes be guided by dignity thus realises Ambedkar’s vision: constitutional compassion made concrete in practice.

Towards a Humane State

The Supreme Court’s judgment is both a legal pronouncement and a moral reminder. It forces us to confront the Dickensian shadows that still haunt our welfare institutions. Just as Oliver Twist’s plea for more gruel unmasked the cruelty of Victorian charity, the judgment unmasks the cruelty of Indian beggars’ homes that resemble prisons.

By anchoring its reasoning in the dignity clause of the Constitution — in both the Preamble and Article 21 — the court reclaimed the promise that the republic made to its weakest citizens. The poor, the abandoned, the homeless are not objects of suspicion or pity; they are constitutional subjects entitled to live with dignity.

(The author is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala and author of The Supreme Codex: A Citizen’s Anxieties and Aspirations on the Indian Constitution).