People beg on the streets of India’s capital out of need, not because they want to. With that ruling earlier this month, Delhi high court judges decriminalised begging in the city, leaving jubilant campaigners hoping they can persuade the rest of the country to follow suit.

“Begging is their last resort to subsistence,” the judges ruled. “Criminalising begging is a wrong approach to deal with the underlying causes of the problem and violates the fundamental rights of some of the most vulnerable people.”

Across the city – in railway stations, markets, at traffic lights – men, women and children beg. Officially, there are more than 400,000 beggars in India, though activists say the real number is much higher.

Before the ruling, police could arrest beggars and they could be sentenced to up to 10 years’ detention in “beggar shelters”. Although the law was rarely enforced, it was often used to harass both beggars and homeless migrants who come to New Delhi to work in construction, according to campaigners.

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Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan, a shelter rights campaign group which filed the petition to the courts, said there was no place in “modern India” for such a law.

“Often if there was a robbery or crime in an area, the police would just swoop down and arrest the beggars in the area, just to show their superiors they were being efficient. Even working people were victims,” said Kumar.

“Our data shows that about 80% of those rounded up often used to be working people – cobblers or auto rickshaw wallahs who sleep on the streets.”

Beggars arouse conflicting feelings among Indians – from pity and guilt, to indifference and contempt. In The White Tiger, Booker prizewinning author Aravind Adiga described beggars as barely registering on the consciousness of rich Indians: “The cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open – a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out of an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road – and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.”

There is a perception that beggars may be part of an organised racket in which they have to hand over most of their pickings to gang leaders. It is believed these gangs drug and abduct children, forcing them to beg. Sometimes they maim adult beggars so their condition will attract more sympathy.

The Delhi high court has recognised forced begging, and retained provisions of the law that punish those who employ people to beg.

At the traffic junction in Nizamuddin East, Bilkis, 19, said she was born into begging. Her father died five years ago, and she has four younger siblings, all sitting near her on the road. Begging is their only income, but neither Bilkis nor her mother had heard of the court ruling. “The police keep trying to move us away. They take us to the police station and tell us to go somewhere else but we always come back,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bilkis, 19, and her family. She says she was ‘born into begging’. Photograph: Amrit Dhillon

About 100 metres away, Uttam and Meena Kurup, a couple who were thrown out of their own home in Agra by their two sons, lie in the shade. “When the police start rounding up beggars, they take us in too even though we aren’t begging. We live on the street but we are not beggars,” said Uttam.

When dignitaries visit or international events take place in the city, the authorities usually clear the streets of beggars and homeless people, bundling them into police vans and dumping them at various shelters on the outskirts. Beggars were removed from the streets of New Delhi before the 2010 Commonwealth Games. In Hyderabad last November, the streets were cleared of homeless people in preparation for Ivanka Trump’s visit for a global summit.

Campaigners plan to continue their legal battle to make all state governments in the country decriminalise begging.

“These are people who are on the edge and deserve our support rather than harassment,” said Kumar.