In spite of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, passed in September last year, the Supreme Court had to step in to put an end to the degrading vocation of manual scavenging. Its directives to the Centre and states to strictly implement the Act are scathing reminders of how little the rest of India cares about those who carry out the dirtiest of jobs at grave personal risk. Without them, our ‘civilised’ world would have crumbled long back.
According to government estimates, there are about three lakh Dalits, mostly women, engaged in the medieval practice of clearing excreta from dry latrines — declared illegal since 1993 — and cleaning drains.
The impact of the 1993 law can be gauged from the 2011 Census report which mentions the existence of 7,94,390 such toilets in the country.
Like most meaningful legislations, the 2013 Act too remains only on paper. The Self-Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers (SRMS), which offers vocational training, cash subsidy and loan, is slow to deliver and prone to corruption, with middle men being the prime beneficiaries of the cash component of the scheme. The SC’s March 27 order for rehabilitation, which also includes providing education and residential plots or houses will make a significant difference in the lives of valmikis.
The other critical issue is the hazardous nature of the vocation. Asphyxiation is common even as the anti-manual scavenging act makes protective gear mandatory for a person entering the underground tunnels.
The death of 30 workers in Tamil Nadu since February 2012 points to grave laxity in safety measures. In such a milieu, the apex court’s decision to award Rs10 lakh compensation for each sewer death occurring due to lack of safety gear is only human. It will now make negligent waste management companies, employing people on a temporary basis, value human lives. The court order doesn’t spare the Railways, the biggest employer for such jobs, either, as the latter is now being forced to look for suitable alternatives for its workforce.
The failure to end manual scavenging points to an even bigger failure in tackling India’s toilet problems. For a country aspiring to be a world leader and an economic giant, its 640 million people defecate in the open, producing 73,000 tonnes of waste every day. The utter disregard for sanitation results in 768,000 deaths every year and a loss of US $54 billion due to various factors such as medical bills and missed work. After all these years, India’s toilet revolution is still a pipe dream.
However, at the root of it all is society’s criminal indifference to its own people. That a fellow human being, a Dalit, has to bear the waste of a privileged person for livelihood is a violation of the human spirit. It negates the cardinal principles of equality and the dignity of labour. Right from the days of Gandhi’s Harijan movement, scavenging has been publicly denounced — even Manmohan Singh has called it “one of the darkest blots on India’s development process”. Yet it has continued, right under our nose, and much to our relief, because it has spared us the ignominy of getting our own hands dirty. We have conveniently dumped the responsibility on the underprivileged who for generations have been subjected to such humiliation.
