Visibility has nothing to do with the eye. A living example of this paradox is the vast population of pavement-dwellers in the city, past whom citizens bustle about their business every day. They need proof that they have been born. It is not even as if this population is inert or silent. Men, women and children are always busy, sometimes earning a little through temporary jobs, sometimes begging, carrying out their own chores ? cooking, quarrelling, washing clothes, having their baths, sleeping under a shelter or without it, making love and nursing babies ? exactly as though they are in the privacy of comfortable homes. But they do not exist in the eyes of the state, they have neither address nor identity, no birth certificates or records of death or marriage, and therefore no marker of family or household. In short, nothing which the state regards as necessary for the recognition of a citizen.

Some blindnesses are induced, as this one is. ?Official? citizens not only share the same pavement in passing, they employ its residents to clean their homes or to push their cars, reject their plea for alms, and step over their feet and heads as they sleep. There is an invisible, but impassable, barrier in consciousness. Similarly, the state appears not to have noticed their existence all these years; it is just that they do not matter.

It is perhaps one of the greatest signs of the state government?s indifference towards the truly deprived that the question of providing pavement-dwellers with birth certificates has been forced upon it by a Central government decision to distribute these certificates on a national scale. Red tape offers a notoriously tangled web ? a birth certificate requires an address, and local councillors are reportedly unwilling to sign papers attesting to the residence of a pavement-dweller. Children born there are completely missing in the lists of the national population council. Without birth certificates or addresses, they cannot be easily admitted into schools. Other cities, like Hyderabad and Delhi, have found ways of providing some sort of recognition to pavement-dwellers through quasi-official means. At least, they exist.

The issue is not solely of deprivation ? no benefits of education or health, for example ? but also of a total lack of security. Girls and young boys on the streets are the perfect target of traffickers and drug traders. With no official identity, they are victims without protection. Naturally, the boys are also outlaws in the making. Besides, they offer easy pickings for extremist groups. They are invisible to the state and so can be used, paid or coerced, to do anything. If the state feels small concern about the total lack of rights of some of its inhabitants, it should at least be concerned about the growing population of disaffected poor it is nurturing. If humanity and duty are not issues, self-interest should be. A way of providing them with some sort of document has to be found. Other changes will follow only after that.