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Major international events often impose enormous burdens on poor and minority communities. Roughly 1.5 million people, for instance, will be displaced by the Beijing Olympics. For the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea forcibly evicted 720,000 people while the homeless population was detained in the city's outskirts. The 1996 Atlanta Games uprooted about 30,000 poor residents, and Sydney, Athens, and other Olympic cities witnessed similar social dislocations. But New Delhi has taken its "preparations" for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, kind of a mini-Olympics involving current and former British colonies, a step further: by arresting and imprisoning beggars.

Delhi's Social Welfare Department is organizing "cleanup operations," the Christian Science Monitor reports:

Every morning, it dispatches nine vans from its Beggar Raid Team. Each carries three plainclothes men, who scan the crowded streets of bullock carts, cows, motorbikes, cycle rickshaws, newspaper hawkers, and stray dogs for ragged people pleading for money.

"Since the end of last year, we've been told to increase the numbers we arrest," says Anand Pandey, a civil servant known as a "raid officer" ...

Warrants are not necessary for arresting beggars. Once picked up, they are tried in the city's Beggars' Court. Those whom Mr. Pandey calls "first-time offenders" often go free with a warning. Others are incarcerated until friends or family scrape together the money to pay their bail of about 3,000 rupees (about $75). Many are locked up in "beggars' homes" – dedicated jails – for a minimum of one year and a maximum of 10, the latter being the same penalty given for violent robberies. If they are "blind, a cripple or otherwise incurably helpless," according to the law, beggars can be locked up for life.

The city is also creating a "beggar database" to hold the photographs and fingerprints of offending beggars, so that "habitual" panhandlers can be convicted more easily. Already, during the past year, 2,537 beggars have been arrested and 1,133 convicted. Many of the city's beggars are elderly, ill, or amputees, and have little chance of finding regular work.

Let's face it, the city is arresting and locking up these beggars for no reason other than that they are poor. "Many of these people have no option but to beg. To arrest them without even providing the infrastructure that guarantees them the most basic needs is appalling," Anand Kumar, a human rights lawyer in New Delhi, told the Monitor. With such cruel and regressive attitudes toward the poor, New Delhi's efforts to portray itself as a modern "world-class city" for the Commonwealth Games are doomed to fail -- at least in the eyes of human-rights campaigners around the world.