Is there anything that ties the humble tomato with a smartphone, bulldozer, manhole cover and an Aadhaar card? When objects speak, what do they reveal about our living conditions? With Talking Things, The Wire takes a deeper look at how these mundane objects have evolved against the backdrop of the Modi-led Union government’s decade-long tenure.
New Delhi: Among the most suppressed persons anywhere in the world, it is people from the Dalit community who effectively end up cleaning India’s sewage and going down manholes to encounter toxic fumes and noxious gases.
India is marking just over 40 years of introducing legislation to end manual scavenging and 10 years since that law was expanded to prohibit all kinds of manual cleaning of latrines, open drains and pits. But exactly like the manhole cover made of iron, a lid on the conversation around manual scavengers’ lived realities and the fate of the law hangs heavy.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
In 1993, India introduced the The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, outlawing manual scavenging. But only on paper. In 2013, The “Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act” expanded the scope of the 1993 legislation and called for rehabilitation of those employed in the hazardous cleaning of sewers, septic tanks and other kinds of insanitary latrines.
“Any person or agency who engages any person for manual scavenging in violation of the provisions of the MS Act, 2013 is punishable under Section 8 of the above Act, with imprisonment up to 2 years or fine up to Rs. One Lakh or both,” the 2013 Act said.
The Safai Karamchari Andolan’s (SKA’s) numbers make it clear that this has not happened. The organisation calculates that there are “26,00,000 people involved in cleaning community dry latrines, 7,70,000 workers in sewer cleaning, 36,176 in manual scavenging at railway stations and nearly 1,760 individuals have lost their lives due to poisonous gases” in the process since 2000.
Seeing what is under a manhole
Magsaysay award winner Bezwada Wilson, one of the founders and national convenor SKA, says the problem is at least two-fold.
There is a deep hesitation among large sections of those forced to clean sewers and go down manholes about admitting that they do the work they do. Sanitation work in India is locked in with caste and carries social stigma. So unlike a neighbouring country like Sri Lanka, which has been able to handle this basic issue, India is hobbled by sanitation workers accepting their work as something they are condemned to do.
Others, who are not forced to go down sewers to make ends meet, just don’t seem to see the problem. Wilson has conducted several marches across the country to emphasise on the existence of sewer and septic tank deaths. He maintains that one of the basic human rights is the right to life and right to live with dignity, “but our social and political system denies both of them to us.”
The misplaced anxiety of the Union government to falsely declare areas and even the country open defecation free and to insist that there are “no deaths” in the country due to manual scavenging have compounded the crisis. The government says deaths have occurred only while cleaning sewers and septic tanks, but activists insist that both are the same thing.
Wilson’s and SKA’s campaigns are to “speak vocally, loudly, expressively, so that attention can be drawn to this dreadful practice pushed under the carpet. We need to accept this dark side of our society as a social evil and gather momentum around eradicating this”, he says explaining his all-India marches to raise awareness around the issue. “They energise communities”, he says.
‘Caste-less’ Swachhta Abhiyan
In 2014, shortly after coming to power, the Modi government launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, its first mega project, on Gandhi’s birth anniversary. With his round-framed spectacles as its emblem, a campaign to ‘clean India’ could hardly be faulted, especially given near-absent civic sense and filthy urban sprawls.
However, a strong movement to eradicate manual scavenging had already begun brewing in 2013. On January 31 that year, months before India passed the 2013 manual scavenging Act, the UN High Commission for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, applauded India’s efforts to put an end to the practice “which, because of the stigma attached to it, has traditionally been carried out by Dalit women in a clear manifestation of discrimination based on caste and gender.”
Pillay’s comments came on the day a two-month long march against manual scavenging, the ‘Maila Mukti Yatra’, was to conclude in New Delhi.
But with the introduction of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan a year later, the sanitation movement in the country was rendered caste-less.
Wilson reckons that globally, this question was a tough chestnut for the BJP to crack in a desire to paint India as a golden Hindu India. It did little for Hindu pride as this focussed on the caste system and living vestiges of the practice of untouchability.
After all, Prime Minister Modi had a book out called KARMYOG, hailing manual scavenging as a “spiritual experience” for the Valmiki community. (The book since then has been reportedly withdrawn, but it remains available on BJP’s online library, and has a prominent picture of Modi himself.)
Whereas no one could really see untouchability, the practice of manual scavenging was a tangible and starkly visible reality. But Wilson observes that the idea of “everyone” being involved in the mission to clean India, is a superficial one. It was more about events, brand ambassadors and glamourising the broom and less about the serious problem of how sanitation is actually managed in India’s cities and sprawling villages.
The caste dimension of India’s massive sanitation crisis was not made explicit when Swachh Bharat was launched. It soon degenerated into the prime minister, other senior ministers and politicians sweeping floors with large brooms, and in some cases, clearing strategically placed trash or dry leaves.
“Without explicitly tying the sanitation and manual scavenging crisis in India with caste, Modi spent Rs 2 lakh crore on it. But India lost the opportunity to go to the heart of the problem, dip deep and do genuine soul-searching and make India clean,” Wilson said.
The toilet construction programme, though, continued. Government data records that nearly 11 crore toilets were constructed under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan between October 2014 and February 2022.
But, with no real management or flush system in place, over the years, the cleaning of dry pits has had disastrous consequences. “There is no flush system in place. The numbers of people dying, involved in cleaning the now really filled-up large pits, has increased after several years of the toilets having been constructed,” Wilson said.
Deaths and rehabilitation
As per data provided to Parliament on December 5, 2023, the Union minister of state for social justice and empowerment, Ramdas Athawale, admitted that over 400 people died while cleaning septic tanks and sewers in India between 2018 and 2023.
Last year, the Supreme Court ordered that the Union and state governments must ensure the complete eradication of manual scavenging while increasing the compensation in the cases of sewer deaths to Rs 30 lakh. It also said that compensation in the case of permanent disability should be Rs 20 lakh, and Rs 10 lakh should be given for other forms of disability arising out of manual cleaning of sewers.
The other aspect crucial to the practice of abolishing manual scavenging is the rehabilitation scheme for manual scavengers.
Scholar Jawed A. Khan of the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA India) told The Wire that the Self-Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers (SRMS) was replaced by the National Action For Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE) last year.
The scheme is expected to cover 4,800 Urban Local Bodies and benefit about one lakh sewers and septic tank workers with the budgetary outlay of Rs 350 crore during the next three years.
NAMASTE was allocated Rs 97.41 crore in 2023-24 budget, but the allocation was reduced to Rs 30.06 crore in the Revised Estimates. An allocation of Rs 116.94 crore has been made in 2024-25 Budgetary Estimates.
“NAMASTE, however,” says Khan, “has limited coverage in some parts of cities and towns that depend upon septic tanks and do not have sewer lines. The new scheme also does not have any provision of direct cash assistance that was given under the previous scheme.”
But why discontinue SRMS?
Journalist Kashvi Raj Singh, reporting for her college publication Covering Deprivation in January 2023, met Champa(35), a Dalit Valmiki woman from UP’s Saintha village in Akbarpur tehsil of Kanpur Dehat. Champa told her, “When you are in our profession, you begin to hate the colour yellow.” She first began cleaning human excreta when she was 14 years old. “For days, I would puke at the sight of dal,” she said. Champa finally stopped cleaning dry latrines in 2021 but now cleans toilets and unclogs sewers in her village.
According to activists, despite much talk of mechanisation, AI and tech, the absence of any meaningful push for technology that can mechanise the disposal of sewage and organise its handling in India is due to a mindset that does not see this as a problem.
“The discontinuation of SRMS also comes at a time when there has been much debate in the country regarding the difference between manual scavengers and those who clean sewers and septic tanks,” says Khan.
He adds, “Government has stopped the implementation of SRMS despite the existence of manual scavengers in the country. In 2018, a survey was conducted in 194 districts throughout the country and 58,098 manual scavengers were identified. Civil society groups associated with MoSJE found that manual scavenging existed in 170 districts in 2020. Over 6,000 such cases of manual scavenging were reported through the Swachhata App. But this data has not been verified by the state governments for further policy action.”
Read more from Talking Things, here.
