“The day everyone in India gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.”
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said these famous lines, and even after 71 years of independence, we still are lacking in this context.
The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act was released in 2013. The Act’s main aim was to end the practice of any form of manual cleaning, carrying, disposing, or handling human waste.
As written in the Gazette of India, “manual scavenger” means a person engaged or employed, at the commencement of this Act or at any time after that, by an individual or a local authority or an agency or a contractor, for manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling in any manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit into which the human excreta from the insanitary latrines is disposed of, or on a railway track or in such other spaces or premises, as the Central Government or a State Government may notify, before the excreta fully decomposes in such manner as may be prescribed, and the expression “manual scavenging” shall be construed accordingly.
In layman’s terms, manual scavengers are the people who carry the human excreta from households with dry latrines. And this work is generally carried forward by the lowest members of the society.
As per the Supreme Court of India, about 7, 00,000 manual scavengers were still doing their jobs in 2004. The number went down significantly in the following years, but it didn’t end. And now, the employment rate might increase again.
The problem of Manual Scavenging has persisted in India for quite a long time. During British rule, when the first municipalities were included, scavengers were employed to collect waste. From then till today, people are still registered as manual scavengers. These are employed within Indian railways, Defence services, and other remote industries.
Every year many deaths take place in India due to the continued practice of Manual Scavenging. 2019 recorded the maximum number of deaths in the past five years. But is the world aware of Manual Scavenging? Many people know about it, but not exactly. Very few people know about the history, consequences, harmful effects, government provisions, and developments in power to look upon this Act.
The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 punishes scavengers’ employment or the construction of dry (non-flush) latrines with imprisonment one year and a fine of Rs 2,000. But does this stop manual scavenging?
In 2019, I interviewed the head of a Safai Karamchari group from Gujarat. He and his group gathered in front of Jantar Mantar to put forward their demands to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. People working in this job have to go down the septic tanks and sewers and collect the waste with their bare hands.
They are not provided with any safety equipment. They manage the waste and keep it on their heads to carry it out. And yet, these are the people the society looks upon the most. They are not given any respect and are called out by different names in different places.
There are so many things for us as humans to realize, but the most important is that life matters, not only of us but also of others. Manual Scavenging is a dirty job that compromises the dignity of these individuals, and it should be eradicated soon.
Featured image is for representational purposes only.
We still see news of people dying, going down the sewers, picking up human waste. So many harmful gases persist in these sewers that they lead to the death of the individual.
In an interview, the Union Ministry of Social Justice (MSJE) said that 282 sanitation workers have died in septic tanks between 2016 and November 2019. But these deaths were reported only according to the FIRs that were filed.
On the other hand, Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), which works on eradicating manual Scavenging, said that since 2000 when they started recording, the number of deaths reached 1760.
Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of ‘registered’ manual scavengers, more than half of India. However, the highest number of registered deaths are from Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. This is according to the 2019 data given by MSJE.
In 2019, I interviewed the head of a Safai Karamchari group from Gujarat. He and his group gathered in front of Jantar Mantar to put forward their demands to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. People working in this job have to go down the septic tanks and sewers and collect the waste with their bare hands.
They are not provided with any safety equipment. They manage the waste and keep it on their heads to carry it out. And yet, these are the people the society looks upon the most. They are not given any respect and are called out by different names in different places.
There are so many things for us as humans to realize, but the most important is that life matters, not only of us but also of others. Manual Scavenging is a dirty job that compromises the dignity of these individuals, and it should be eradicated soon.