Throwing off the yoke of manual scavenging
Vidya Subrahmaniam
https://www.thehindu.com/
On November 1, a unique journey will come to a ceremonious end in
Delhi. Earlier this month, five bus loads of men and women headed out
from different corners of the country with one slogan on their lips:
honour and liberation for those still trapped in the horror of manual
scavenging.
When the protesters (most of them former manual scavengers) set out on
their mission, they knew that the Samajjik Parivartan Yatra (national
rally for social transformation) would have to be more than a petition
to the government. A comprehensive rehabilitation package was
undoubtedly at the core of the yatra's demands. But there was equally
another objective: To motivate the remaining members of the scavenging
community to throw off the yoke — on their own, without waiting for a
package. Bezwada Wilson, convenor of the Safai Karamacharis Andolan
(SKA) and the brain behind the rally, explains the concept of
self-liberation: “Manual scavenging is a blot on humanity, and if you
engage in it, it is a crime you commit on yourself. So, don't wait for
the government, break free.”
Given the depth of emotion in this message, it will be a double crime
if the government does not do everything in its power to hasten the
process of liberation. Perhaps that is why, on October 25, the Sonia
Gandhi-led National Advisory Council proposed a far-reaching package
of reforms to end the practice. Nonetheless, the irony is inescapable.
Sixty-three years after Independence, India is still debating the best
way to lift manual scavengers out of their collective misery.
Mr. Wilson was a young boy when his family in Karnataka sent him away
to study in a school across the border in Andhra Pradesh. He came home
for holidays but felt out of place in a community whose defining
feature was the uncontrolled violence of its menfolk. It was the early
1970s and they lived in a large, grimy neighbourhood around the edges
of the Kolar Gold township. The evenings were always the same. The men
would get into a drunken rage and assault the women senseless. The
pattern of male aggression and female submission was common to most
feudal, patriarchal societies, but even by this yardstick, the
violence was excessive.
The teenager knew he had been born to a family of sweepers. The local
school he went to as a child was segregated and was known by a swear
word. But that still did not explain the anger that erupted around
him. His father, a retired government employee, and his brother,
mysteriously employed in an unnamed place, stonewalled his questions.
Determined, the boy followed his brother to his workplace, where the
horror of manual scavenging hit him like a million lashes.
Mr. Wilson learnt that he and his family were part of a huge community
of manual scavengers that serviced the Kolar Gold township. They
physically lifted and carried human excreta from the township's
network of dry latrines. He could now see where the violence came
from. But he could also see the unfairness of it all on the women who
formed 85 per cent of the manual scavenging workforce. The women of
his community were victims thrice over: they were outcasts even among
Dalits; they were despised and shunned for the work they did, and they
were physically abused by the men who saw the beatings as an outlet
for their frustrations.
The employment of humans to clean human faeces was unarguably the
worst violation of human rights anywhere in the world. The degrading
act stripped the individual of her dignity while the constant handling
of excreta brought in its wake crippling illnesses and infections that
went untreated because the community bore the cross of untouchability.
Over the next decade-and-a-half, Mr. Wilson worked at educating the
elders and spreading awareness about the dehumanising aspect of their
occupation. But it was difficult to organise a community that was
simply unprepared to give up its job.
This was a baffling paradox. On the one hand, there was the daily
ritual of the men drinking and getting violent to forget the pain and
humiliation of manual scavenging. At the same time, there was a sense
of ownership about the job. “It is our job,” they told Mr. Wilson,
vastly complicating his effort simultaneously to organise them, fight
the company management that employed them, and push the government
towards banning the occupation and rehabilitating the workers.
Mr. Wilson told The Hindu, “Our people had internalised their
oppression. They saw themselves as a condemned lot, it was their fate,
they had to do this work.” If the manual scavenging community, now
included among the safai karamcharis (sweepers) to diminish the
ugliness of the act, owned up its work due to an acute lack of
self-worth, those higher in the caste hierarchy compounded the injury
by perpetuating the myth that toilet cleaning and allied activities,
like sweeping and picking up garbage, could only be done by the
valmiki Dalits, also known as dom, hela, hadi, arundatiyar, madiga,
relli, pakhis, chekilliyars, etc.
Incredibly, the ridiculous notion prevailed even at the level of
governments — and it continues to prevail — with job reservation for
the Scheduled Castes translating as the Dalit castes forming the
majority of workforce in Class IV and lower categories. Whatever the
official explanation for this, this was nothing if not the Varna
system by diktat.
The insensitivity of officialdom to manual scavenging can be seen from
the length of time it took India to formally ban the practice. The
Constitution abolished untouchability once and for all in 1950. The
Protection of Civil Rights Act, which prescribed punishments for
untouchability, followed in 1955, and The Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act came in 1989. But
manual scavenging, which is untouchability at its most violent, was
prohibited by legislation only in 1993. The Employment of Manual
Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act came
into force 46 years after Independence.
Far worse, manual scavenging continues to this day, with many Central
and State government departments themselves employing manual
scavengers in violation of the 1993 Act. The worst offender in this
respect has been the Union Ministry of Railways: the open discharge
system of toilets in train carriages results in excreta having to be
manually lifted off the tracks. Many municipalities too continue to
use dry latrines.
In 2003, the Supreme Court directed all the State governments to file
affidavits on manual scavenging, taking a serious view of a PIL
petition filed by the SKA and 18 other social action groups. The Uttar
Pradesh government admitted to the practice as did the Railway
Ministry. But most other State governments brazenly lied that their
States were “free from manual scavenging.” The SKA, which has an
entire library devoted to the documentation of the practice, has
clinching photographs and data that establish the lie. The Andolan
estimates that there are currently over 3 lakh manual scavengers, down
from 13 lakh a decade ago. However, it attributes the declining
numbers as much to voluntary liberation as to official intervention.
So far, manual scavenging has been tackled at two levels: The
conversion of dry latrines into pour-flush toilets and the
rehabilitation of those engaged in the practice. The rehabilitation
itself has been terribly half-hearted; a shocking report in The Hindu
shows that the district administration in Ambala fired manual
scavengers it had re-employed as sweepers. The crucial issue,
therefore, is a vital third element: the de-stigmatisation of the
so-called menial jobs via changes in recruitment patterns and
policies. Without this overhaul, manual scavenging will continue in
one form or another.
It is also necessary to expand the definition of manual scavenging to
include other kinds of unhygienic toilet cleaning. The Union Ministry
of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation has been overseeing the
elimination of dry latrines since 2004. According to the Ministry, the
numbers of dry latrines have declined from a total of 6 lakh in six
States to about 2.4 lakh in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Uttarakhand.
But significantly the Ministry makes the point that while dry latrines
may be on their way out, this does not necessarily mean the end of
manual cleaning of excreta. A recent paper prepared by HUPA says that
in the poorer areas in many towns and cities, the dry latrines have
given way to “bahao” latrines. These are not connected to septic tanks
or underground pits but flow out directly into open drainage,
resulting in the “sludge and excreta” having to be manually removed.
Says the paper: “These unsanitary latrines require continuous
cleaning, which is done by municipal staff and almost always manually,
with the most rudimentary appliances.”
And no prizes for guessing which castes form the municipal staff. As
Union Minister for HUPA Kumari Selja says: “It is ultimately about
attitudes. As long as society treats toilet cleaning and sweeping as
menial jobs to be done only by certain members of the caste system, it
will be difficult to end the obnoxious practice. The scavenging and
sweeping community will be truly liberated when cleaning jobs become
respectable with the workforce drawn from all communities.”
