Earlier this month, two people died while cleaning a sewer in West Delhi’s Mundka Area after inhaling toxic gases inside the sewer they had entered to clear out a blockage. The High Court of Delhi took suo moto cognisance of the deaths the next morning and issued notice to the municipal corporation and the Delhi government.
Deaths due to manual scavenging are a recurring phenomenon in India today. So much so that even the Supreme Court in 2019 noted that “In no country, people are sent to gas chambers to die. Every month 4-5 people lose their lives due to manual scavenging”. It is appalling to note that the practice had taken hundreds of lives even after being criminalised way back in 2013 when Parliament enacted the ‘Prevention of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013’.
The 2013 Act did three broad things. Firstly, it criminalised manual scavenging and any act of employment of an individual as a manual scavenger. Secondly, it sought to rehabilitate manual scavengers and provide for their alternative employment. Finally, it fixed the responsibility on the local authorities to implement the Act. It also constituted an independent National Commission for Safai karamcharis to monitor the implementation of the Act.
The larger goal of the Act was to correct the historical wrongs and injustice meted out to the SC & ST community members who had been engaged in such a dehumanising practice for decades because of the highly iniquitous caste system. This social menace has existed for thousands of years now and has been promoted by a Brahmanical social order.
However, despite the tall claims of the 2013 Act, not even a single conviction has occurred in the last nine years. Last year, MoS for Social Justice and Empowerment, Ramdas Athawale in a written reply in Rajya Sabha, said that 66,692 manual scavengers had been identified by the government. On the one hand, the government claimed that no deaths had occurred due to manual scavenging, but on the other admitted that more than 900 people had died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks.
The above distinction between ‘manual scavenging’ & ‘cleaning sewers and septic tanks’ is flawed and distorted because those who die while cleaning sewers and septic tanks are none other than manual scavengers themselves. This is also true because all claims to mechanise sewer cleaning have failed and have not been implemented on the ground.
Way back in 1956, the ‘Kaka Kalelkar Commission’ had called for the mechanisation of sewer cleaning. The Barve Commission (1949) and the Pandya Committee (1968) also suggested ways to improve the lives of manual scavengers and regulate their service conditions. The first statute that called for the abolition of scavenging was the ‘Protection of Civil Rights Act’ enacted in 1955.
The 2013 Act did not do anything different. It laid the responsibility for using modern technologies for cleaning sewers on local authorities and agencies. However, increasing corruption in municipal corporations and lack of awareness in Panchayats coupled with a deeply entrenched social prejudice favouring discriminatory behaviours and attitudes against a particular community has led to the failure of the mechanisation dream. Manual scavengers continue to work under life-threatening conditions without safety gear and proper equipment. They risk suffering severe health hazards such as asphyxiation due to inhaling poisonous gases, cholera, hepatitis, meningitis, jaundice, serious skin disorders, cardiovascular diseases, and serious types of cancer, among others. They are also met with social ostracism, suffer untouchability and are abysmally low-wage workers.
The Supreme Court of India took note of the plight of manual scavengers in the country in two important and landmark judgments - Safai Karamchari Andolan & ors. Vs. Union of India (2013) & Delhi Jal Board vs. National Campaign & Ors. (2011).
In the 2011 judgment, the Apex Court in the words of Justice G.S. Singhvi, observed that the “State apparatus is insensitive to the safety and well-being of those who are, on account of sheer poverty, compelled to work under most unfavourable conditions and regularly face the threat of being deprived of their life.” The Apex court further observed that “The human beings who are employed for doing the work in the sewers cannot be treated as mechanical robots, who may not be affected by poisonous gases in the manholes.”
Unfortunately, the state’s only response to the above concern has been to roll out policy initiatives that aim to solve the problem only through a top-down approach instead of a bottom-up one. For instance, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which aims to make India open defecation free and is an effort to achieve universal sanitation coverage, does not focus on the faulty designs of septic tanks across India that are not machine friendly. The campaign instead goes on to aggressively build toilets across the country based on the same old design that will eventually need manual scavengers to clean them. This further perpetuates social evil and institutionalises indifference as a method of governance.
Another big failure of the state has been its complete ignorance of the intersectional issues of discrimination and the plight of women manual scavengers in the country. While the men are tasked with getting into the sewers, women are made to clean dry toilets and ferry excreta. It is even harder for them to escape this cycle, and they face far more brutality than men if they refuse to work. Policy initiatives, therefore, cannot anymore continue to look at the community of manual scavengers from a single lens.
While speaking about the plight of manual scavengers, B R Ambedkar said, “In India, a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is a scavenger because of his birth irrespective of the question of whether he does scavenging or not.” Seventy-five years post Independence, we haven’t quite fulfilled his goal of a ‘social democracy’. India continues to treat a certain section of its population as if they are children of a lesser god. We need to change that, and we need to change that soon.
Anurag Tiwary
Delhi-based Lawyer
Bhavya Singh
UN Millenium Fellow ‘22