Puri (Odisha): At six o’clock each morning, Rabi Naik leaves his home in Penthakatha in Odisha’s Puri district. On most days he wears a scrappy shirt and a worn out trouser. For the next four to six hours, depending on the work load, Rabi will be at a roadside, cleaning a drain, a manhole or simply the road.
“I have been doing this for almost a decade now. My mother was involved in the same work and now I have taken up the job to sustain my family,” says Rabi.
Rabi is among the 770 odd workers employed by the Puri municipality as sanitation workers. For many of them, their forefathers did the same work, without the tag of the “sanitation worker”. They were called manual scavengers, or ‘mehenters’ in Odia.
Puri, the abode of Lord Jagannath, has a past ignominy of Dalits and the lower caste – mostly women – manually cleaning the open toilets of ‘sevayats’ (the priests of the Sri Jagannath temple) in earlier times.
“There is no specific dateline of when it started. But, in times when manual scavenging was widely prevalent, the lower caste people would do the cleaning job. These ‘Harijans,’ as they were called, would enter the open toilets of the upper caste people (mostly Brahmins) and clean them manually. They had a specified ‘narrow lane’ to walk through to the toilets directly and clean them. The women would clean the latrine and men would clean the roads,” says Surya Rath Sharma, a renowned researcher on the Sri Jagannath temple and its culture.
With the open toilet system being replaced by modern toilets and drainage, women and men like Rabi are now ‘sanitation workers,’ and are employed by the local municipality.
However, the caste-based labour, untouchability and humiliation continues in similar and different forms.
“It goes down the family lineage. My mother and father worked as manual scavengers and today I am also doing the same job. Though ‘manual scavenging’ has officially been banned, there are still a few people who are engaged in the job,” says Tuna Naik, the general secretary of the workers’ union.
The Puri municipality divides people like Rabi and Tuna into three categories – permanent, work charge (workers get paid the same as permanent employees but are denied benefits like pension) and temporary. While Tuna now mostly supervises workers, Rabi is in the temporary category of workers. He is not entitled to any medical allowance and is paid a bare Rs 200 per day.
“The government has raised the allowance twice in two years – which should fetch us Rs 224 a day. But the new slab is yet to be implemented and we get Rs 200 instead. We had several discussions with the municipality, but no to no avail,” says Tuna.
Also read: ‘They Were Hired for Housekeeping and Then Forced to Enter the Sewer’
As if a two-time allowance increase that sums up to barely Rs 24 isn’t pittance enough, the workers have to report to work every day and finish their job on a daily basis. Any absence or neglect is a threat to their daily wage.
“If we miss work for even one day, we don’t get payment. Even if we fall sick and show a doctor’s certificate, the authorities say we are temporary workers and bound to work. What’s worse is if we fall ill working in such unhygienic conditions and complain to our superiors, they threaten us to either work and earn, or leave the job,” Rabi adds.
Every year, Puri with its sprawling beaches and the famous Jagannath temple attracts over one crore tourists (day visitors). During the Rath Yatra in July, there are more than 15 lakh tourists visiting the temple town during the nine days of festivities. Behind the grandeur of the Rath Yatra is the unnoticed sweat and labour of men like Rabi. The roads where the chariots of the Trinity – Lord Jagannath, Lord Balabhadra and Goddess Sunhadra – roll, the ‘Bada Danda’ or the ‘Grand Road’, are cleaned and swept late at night.
The nine days may be a festive occasion for the people of Puri, but it means additional work for sanitation workers like Rabi, who start at night and continue late into the afternoon of the next day.
“During Rath Yatra, all the workers in Puri are employed to keep up with the work load. The temporary ones might be directly employed by the municipality, or through some agencies that are brought in during that time. For workers, the change in authority is of least importance, because the work remains the same – cleaning,” says Tuna.
Also read: Is the Government Underreporting the Number of Manual Scavengers on Purpose?
While the basic work has remained the same over the years, the role of men and women have been swapped. Now, the women mostly sweep and clean the roads and the men clean the drains.
“Mostly women do the sweeping part and the men clean the drains and the manholes. Though most of the waste management is done through machines now, in several areas where the machines can’t reach, the people are asked to do the job manually,” says another supervisor engaged by the municipality.
Credit: Shamim Qureshy
Most of the sanitation workers live in five slums – Markendeswar Sahi, Narendra Pushkarini, near Gopabandhu colony, Chakratirtha road and Balisahi basti. They together make the ‘Harijan basti’. While Markendeswar Sahi and Narendra Pushkarini are closer to the temple and cater to that part, others are scattered across the seaside town, some even in the heart of the town, but inhabited only by these sanitation workers. Public imagination on what manual scavenging looks like is limited, but comes across clearly in daily interactions and notion of purity and polluted.
Men like Tuna and Rabi do go inside the Puri Jagannath Temple, which otherwise has several restrictions on visitor’s entry including no entry for foreigners and non-Hindus. They can also take part in the Rath Yatra celebrations.
Equal in the eyes of God, they are discriminated by public and society. “If Lord Jagannath, who is the Lord of the universe, treats us equally, who are these people to treat us like this?” Rabi says.
