He says he found them in the pockets of Shanni Ram Ganga, a hunched man standing next to him facing a sentence of one to three years. Ganga's alleged crime: begging.
Beggars crowd every sidewalk in India, yet panhandling is illegal, so a separate judicial system exists just for those accused of pleading for coins in public. More than 1,400 people are serving sentences in beggars' homes
- rundown facilities often little better than prisons, critics say - and that number is expected to rise as the government "cleans up" the Indian capital to host the Commonwealth Games, a major sports competition, in 2010.
The beggars' courts are corners of musty bureaucracy and Dickensian poverty untouched by India's surging prosperity. They're all but forgotten by most of the public, but are far from endangered.
There are some 60,000 beggars in New Delhi, most earning 50-100 rupees a day, not much less than the working poor, according to a recent government-commissioned study on beggars. Many are handicapped. Nearly all hail from India's poor northern states. Most said they have no skills.
Several times a week, about a dozen of them are swept up by the authorities and entered into the beggars' court system.
On a blazing hot summer day, a group of lepers accused of begging at a city temple marched to a waiting police van as officers barked at them to stay in line.
Each had his own collection of missing limbs and cruel disfigurements - one had two prosthetic legs and round paddles for his fingerless hands; another had toeless feet sticking out of his sandals.
They hadn't been begging as flagrantly as others nearby, but A.M. Pandey, the official leading the raid, said they were sitting in hopes of charity, and that was cause enough to lock them up. Warrants aren't necessary for arresting beggars, defined in Indian law books as anyone "having no visible means of substinence and wandering about."
Only one man put up a fight.
Ram Pal, 60, threw himself on the ground to touch the officers' feet, a sign of respect and humility in India, and pleaded for one more chance.
"You don't need me," he wailed. "I won't beg again."
It was no use. Pandey and two police officers pried his fingers from the car door and pushed him in with the others.
"I am 100 percent sure they were begging," Pandey said as he ordered the men to sit on each other's laps to make room.
More than two dozen beggars remained in the plaza, but Pandey started the engine with a shrug.
"We don't have space," he said.
Some of the arrested men said they preferred incarceration to life on the streets.
"I want to go back to jail," said Arjun Behra, 45. "I have no one outside."
They were taken to a station house next to the court, and with a long wait ahead, two of the men unstrapped their prosthetic legs the way other men might loosen their ties.
Activists working on behalf of the beggars call the system inhumane.
"One has the right to dignity, right to life, which the government today is denying by putting these destitute people into jails," said Indu Prakash Singh of ActionAid, a nonprofit activist aid group.
Beggars' court is its own fiefdom within India's famously dysfunctional court system. It's overseen in New Delhi by Suresh Gupta who alone determines whether to release the accused with a warning or sentence them to incarceration.
