The moot question remains: when will the government and society stop hiring people for such dangerous and demeaning work of cleaning septic tanks and manholes?
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Activist Parsottam Vaghela has successively, after a month’s effort, on the late night of December 3, one month and three days after 3 sanitation workers died due to poisonous gas while cleaning septic tank in Vadodara, managed to register a First Information Report(FIR). Under the law, it is a crime to employ any person as manual scavenger or as manhole worker to clean manhole, septic tank. The FIR has been registered with regards to the deaths of 3 manhole workers at the Arani Police Station, Vadodara under sections 304 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Sections 3(1)(j), 2 and 5 of the Prevention of Atrocities Act(PoA Act) and Sections 8 and 9 of the Manual Scavenging Act.
Soon after the incident, the police had, typically, registered the cause of deaths as ‘accidental death’. It is the persistent efforts of a Dalit rights group that remedied this. Parsottam Vaghela from Manav Garima, a CBO Valmiki community visited the victim families and police and asked them to lodge FIR against employers. But, victim families were influenced by political forces and no one came forward to lodge complain in police station. PI of Arani Police Station said that he would file FIR if any person from deceased persons came forwards with a complaint. Parsottambhai talked Police Commissioner, Collector of Vadodara. He also talked with joint Director of SC Welfare but no one acted on this. Finally, after interventions with the Director General of Police (DGP) Gujarat on December 3 an FIR was finally lodged against Shakti Jagdish and Dhaval Kishor yesterday night.
The moot question remains: when will the government and society stop hiring people for such dangerous and demeaning work of cleaning septic tanks and manholes?
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