Programmes
Citizenship Entitlements
The Citizenship Entitlements Programme works to ensure that people living in destitution, homelessness, and other conditions of extreme vulnerability can access the rights and protections that come with formal recognition from the State. For many on the margins, the absence of basic identity and welfare documents becomes a barrier to healthcare, education, and social security, and the programme therefore works towards attaining actual recognition by facilitating access to these entitlements. It supports individuals in obtaining Aadhaar cards, voter identity cards, ration cards, PAN cards, healthcare cards and disability certificates, and in reaching social security schemes, through outreach, documentation support, accompaniment to government offices, and liaison with authorities to resolve the procedural barriers that people experiencing destitution and homelessness repeatedly face.
Community Outreach
The Community Outreach Programme is designed to reach people where they are, living on the streets, offering immediate support while connecting them with available systems of care. Our teams conduct regular night-out visits across different parts of the city, walking through streets, railway areas, public spaces, and other locations where people are known to sleep, while also exploring new areas. The purpose is to identify individuals in urgent need and to offer immediate relief in the form of food, blankets, and other essentials. Alongside this basic support, the teams enter into conversation to understand each person’s situation and inform them, where possible, about government shelters and other facilities, working with them to facilitate movement to safer accommodation. Through these efforts the programme seeks to ensure that those experiencing homelessness are not left unseen, and that paths to care, safety, and rehabilitation remain open even in the most difficult circumstances.
Advocacy
Advocacy remains at the core of our work. Practising ‘Systems Approach’, we hold that engaging government institutions is essential to any long-term reform, and we work with various agencies to raise the concerns of our target population while grounding every intervention in the day-to-day realities of marginalised communities. We have been consistently active in advocating shelters for the urban homeless, recognising adequate shelter as a fundamental and a critical component of dignified living. Our Managing Trustee serves on the Supreme Court-appointed Monitoring Committee on Shelters for the Urban Homeless, which meets regularly and to which various issues are brought for redressal, and our sustained participation has enabled a significant contribution. Drawing on continuous fieldwork and the actual hindrances people face, the programme carries grassroots knowledge into debates on laws, policies, and administrative practices, in the belief that the voices of those most affected by policy must be reflected within policy debates.
Comprehensive Childhood Programme
Our Comprehensive Childhood Programme works with children growing up in conditions of poverty, instability, and limited access to education and care. The programme brings together education support, emotional care, health linkages, and assistance with identity and government documentation, recognising that a child’s development cannot be addressed in fragments. In equally important measure, we engage children in sports and crafts and familiarise them with government institutions, so that the State appears to them as something approachable rather than distant or hostile. For example, arranging children’s visit to police station where the police personnel explain to them the entire system of how the police station functions; or arranging their conversation with a functionary of the Human Rights Commission who could explain this system to the children by real life examples, or taking them to the municipal office for an understanding of its inner workings.
We work not only with the children themselves but with the families and schools around them, understanding that a child’s prospects are bound up with the wider environment. Through this sustained engagement, the programme seeks to create stable spaces where children can learn, feel safe, and imagine a future with dignity and possibility.
Counselling
Counselling is a regular intervention that runs through much of our work rather than a service reserved for moments of crisis. Working with people who have endured loss, displacement, family rupture, and prolonged insecurity, we approach counselling as sustained psychosocial support. Through careful listening, continuity of contact, and a relationship built over time, the programme helps individuals in navigating their circumstances, recover confidence, and weigh the choices before them. Counselling also extends to families. Because building trust with those who have been repeatedly failed by institutions is a slow procedure, we treat each conversation as part of a longer process. In this way counselling supports recovery, restores a sense of agency, and sustains the dignity on which lasting change depends.
Facilitating Reintegration
Facilitating Reintegration supports individuals as they move from situations of extreme vulnerability towards more stable lives. The programme works with people as they reconnect with family where possible, access shelter, healthcare, livelihoods, and essential documents, and rebuild everyday routines disrupted by homelessness, destitution or institutionalisation. Reintegration is understood not as a single event but as a gradual and slowly unfolding process, shaped by personal history, social relationships, and structural barriers, and rarely following a straight path. The programme therefore emphasises continuous engagement, patience, and respect for individual choices at every stage. Throughout, we remain attentive to the setbacks and hesitations that mark any return to stability, recognising that lasting reintegration requires both sustained material support and the slow restoration of dignity, confidence, and trust.
Health and Mental Health
The Health and Mental Health Programme responds to the everyday realities of illness, distress, and vulnerability that our client group faces. While health is not our direct focus, the nature of community engagement makes timely support unavoidable, and whenever a need of an urgent nature arises, we are required to intervene. We facilitate access to healthcare through existing networks and service systems, prioritising government facilities and turning to charitable or private services only when constraints of time or documents make government access difficult. During outreach, urgent needs are addressed as they arise so that no situation of immediate risk is left unattended. Alongside physical health, the programme recognises the centrality of mental well-being, responding through counselling, careful listening, and long-term engagement to distress caused by loss, trauma, and prolonged insecurity, treating mental health as integral to dignity and recovery.
Legal Aid
The Legal Aid Programme supports individuals in navigating the legal processes that often become barriers to protection and access to rights. The programme provides guidance, referrals, and facilitation of legal support in matters relating to identity documentation, detention, institutionalisation, family separation, and access to welfare and entitlements, areas in which people living in destitution are especially exposed to procedures they have little means to contest. For many, the law is encountered first as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, and the programme works to reverse that experience. Legal aid here is not only technical assistance but a form of support that helps individuals understand their rights, make informed choices, and engage with legal systems more confidently and positively. By demystifying these processes, the programme seeks to make formal protection genuinely accessible to those most often excluded from it.
Networking
The Networking Programme is guided by the understanding that complex social issues such as destitution and homelessness cannot be meaningfully addressed by organisations working in isolation. Emerging from interlinked social, economic, legal, and institutional factors, these conditions require collective responses built on cooperation, shared learning, and coordinated action. Through this programme, Sam-Haq Trust engages a wide range of stakeholders, including civil society organisations, community groups, researchers, academic institutions, legal practitioners, and government systems, creating spaces for collaborative problem-solving that draw together diverse experiences and specialisations. The programme also develops reliable channels of communication and support, enabling organisations to learn from one another’s work, share resources, and build mechanisms for referral and coordinated response, often allowing quicker and more appropriate action when an individual’s circumstances require several institutions or specialised services. In this way it helps build a broader community of practitioners connected through trust and a shared concern for dignity.
Research
Our Research Programme acts as a bridge between grassroots intervention and advocacy, converting what we encounter in the field into knowledge that can shape policy and public perception. It is invested in documenting the lived experiences of people who face destitution, homelessness, marginalisation, and social invisibility, revealing through sustained fieldwork, careful documentation, and reflective analysis how poverty shapes everyday life and how people struggle to preserve dignity in difficult conditions. The programme treats those it studies not as objects of enquiry but as participants whose narratives carry their own authority. Its concerns range from the immediate conditions of people, to the institutional and legal structures that produce and sustain destitution, among them the statutory frameworks that govern begging and confinement. The aim is to make visible the patterns usually hidden from policy and public view, and to generate knowledge that can guide humane policy, strengthen rights, inform our own practice, and support meaningful and lasting social change.
Casework
Our casework programme provides direct and long-term support to individuals experiencing destitution, homelessness, social exclusion, and the criminal justice system. The programme responds to the diverse and often interconnected needs of individuals through personalised engagement and follow-up, including support for mental wellbeing and counselling, healthcare, family tracing,family reintegration, and reconnection with former employers and other sources of livelihood and social support. Where required, the team also facilitates access to relevant services,entitlements, and institutional processes.
The programme recognises that individuals experiencing homelessness, abandonment, or institutionalisation often face multiple and overlapping barriers to stability and reintegration. Casework therefore focuses not only on addressing immediate needs but also on rebuilding social and institutional connections while respecting individual agency and choices. At the same time, documentation of casework experiences enables the orgamisation to identify gaps in institutional practices, and policy frameworks. In this way, individual casework informs evidence-based policy inputs and advocacy.
Strengthening Social Work Education and Practice
We work closely with social work institutes and colleges, hosting students for fieldwork and block placements, providing them opportunities to engage with the realities of working with marginalised and destitute populations. Beyond introducing them to our programmes and interventions, we train to ground them in the broader philosophy, values, and ethical orientation that underpin our work. Apart from fieldwork supervision, we supervise and assist students with their research, conduct sessions and classes within social work institutes, and, where relevant, are regularly part of students’ grading process. Through these engagements, we contribute towards bridging the gap between classroom learning and ground realities, enabling students to develop a deeper understanding of the complexities, challenges, and ethical questions that shape practice. These are the dimensions that cannot be fully captured through curriculum alone.
We invest ourselves in this process to contribute to social work as an academic discipline. By providing meaningful exposure to field realities and reflective practice, we seek to support the development of practitioners who combine professional rigour with contextual understanding, and ethical sensitivity.
Systemic Engagement
We recognise that direct programmes alone, however robust, cannot address the structural conditions that produce and perpetuate destitution, homelessness, and their criminalisation. Our systemic engagement therefore goes beyond direct service
providing to continued dialogue and collaboration with government departments, public institutions, and other organisations which work on related concerns, with the aim of contributing to wider institutional and policy change.
This engagement enables the lived realities encountered through our casework and fieldwork to inform broader institutional and policy conversations. At the same time, working alongside organisations and institutions complementing our expertise allows
us to situate our interventions within a wider network of actors and initiatives addressing poverty, exclusion, homelessness, and their criminalisation.
In this way, systemic engagement connects ground-level practice with structural change. By bringing evidence and insights from direct work into continuous institutional dialogue, we seek to ensure that individual experiences inform collective
understanding and contribute to longer-term efforts towards policy reform, improved institutional practices, and more equitable responses to destitution and homelessness.
Towards Decriminalization of Beggary
Criminalization of poverty, especially the persons engaged in the act of beggary is the core of the work we do at Sam Haq. Seeing the Beggary Law as a legislation that punishes people for being poor, for their vulnerabilities and helplessness we have advocated for the repeal of the existing Beggary Prevention Laws in the country.
Our Founder worked closely with the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, Government of India as a subject expert and also served as a member on the Special Committee that the Ministry had constituted to draft the model legislation for the government. He was also instrumental in drafting of the Ministry’s flagship scheme ‘SMILE’, a national scheme focusing on the rehabilitation of persons engaged in the act of beggary. The scheme uses community-based rehabilitation framework as its foundation.
Presently, two of our Trustees serve as a member on the Advisory Committee constituted by the Department of Women & Child Development, Government of Maharashtra. The mandate of the committee is to support the department with drafting of the law that would decriminalize beggary in the state. In a promising development, a draft has already been prepared and submitted to the state
government and consultations are being held for further processing.
Referrals
The Referrals Programme is an essential part of our work, enabling timely access to services that we either do not directly provide or the client is in such a location where we cannot reach. We both make and receive referrals across health, shelter, legal, and livelihood services, as well as family tracing, working closely with partner organisations to ensure continuity of care and appropriate follow-up. We have a network of organisations and volunteers across states where we connect our clients locally for their concerns. An effective referral often makes the difference between a problem being addressed and a person being turned away. We therefore treat each referral not as a handover that ends our responsibility but as a link in a continuing chain of support, tracking outcomes where we can and maintaining the relationships of trust that allow such coordination to function. In this way the programme helps weave individual interventions into a more coherent system of care.
Social Audit
Social Audit of public institutions such as shelter homes is an important part of our effort to strengthen accountability and transparency in systems that work with people in situations of vulnerability. Through this work, we engage with public institutions to examine everyday practices, service delivery, and living conditions from the perspective of those who use these services. Drawing on observations, interactions with service users, focus group discussions, and dialogue with officials, the social audit seeks to identify gaps between policy intention and ground realities. The aim is constructive engagement that can lead to improvements, encourage humane practices, and support institutions in becoming more responsive to the rights and needs of marginalised communities.