BAGUIO CITY, Sept. 17 (PNA) — The City Social Welfare and Development Office (CSWDO) is discouraging the public from giving alms to beggars.
The said act is against the law and begging on the streets endangers their lives, citing Presidential Decree numbered 1563 signed by the late Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1978, “establishing an integrated system for the control and eradication of mendicancy, providing penalties, appropriating funds there for and for other purposes”.
CSWD Officer Betty Fangasan, on Wednesday said the number of mendicants in Baguio City increase seasonally.
The coming Christmas Season is an indication that mendicants will again infest the city’s streets, Fangasan added.
Fangasan said these mendicants come from the provinces surrounding Baguio City and the Cordillera Region.
The mendicants flock the city between September, the beginning of the Christmas season and May, the end of the dry season, earning as much as PHP600 a day.
Fangasan said the “law is difficult to implement and impose penalties even as we coordinate with other private and government sector partners like the transportation sector.”
Some of these beggars charter vans to ferry their entire family to the city to beg because bus companies have refused to convey them.
Fangasan said the only way to stop these people from coming back to Baguio to beg for a living is for the public not to give them money.
Fangasan cited that other cities in the country do not tolerate the practice of these ethnic groups who make a living out of begging not only because it is against the law, but mainly because begging on the street endangers their lives.
Fangasan said Baguio City Mayor Mauricio Domogan created an inter-agency task force composed of the police, the government and private sector representatives, including the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to look into the plight of these beggars, especially these groups who beg on the streets as families, even letting older children to carry babies with them.
CSWDO records show more than 100 alleged Badjaos from the south come to the city to beg during the Yuletide season. (PNA)