Rural and Urban Beggars of the Aligarh District: a Comparative Spatial Analysis

The paper is an attempt to visualize a comparative view of rural and urban spatial patterns of beggars’ employment, variations in the level of their socio-economic status, and the relationship between their rate of employment with selected variables of socio-economic development in Aligarh district of Uttar Pradesh. The study is based on primary source of data, collected through the field survey in the Aligarh district carried out during 2009. The villages have been selected on the basis of stratified random sampling technique. In this way, 70 villages were selected for the survey from the 1,180 inhabited villages spread over 12 blocks of the study area. Apart from it, all the 13 towns of the district were selected for urban survey. Altogether, 892 households were selected for the present study, in which the rural survey consisted of 496 households and the urban survey comprised 396 households. Spatial analysis reveals that the majority of the central blocks of the district have medium employment rate of rural beggars, whereas, ninety per cent block of the district experienced the low and medium level of employment in urban beggar population. The high level of rural beggars’ socio-economic development is observed in the south-eastern part of the district, whereas, the high level of urban beggars’ socio-economic development is found in the north-western and the south-eastern parts of the district. The association between employment rate of rural beggars and their socio-economic development shows that about seventy five percent blocks of the district are perfectly positive correlated with each other, whereas, sixty percent blocks of the district are perfectly positive correlated with employment rate of urban beggars and their socio-economic development.