On December 13, during the ongoing winter parliamentary session, Mohammed Nadimul Haque, an All India Trinamool (TMC) member of parliament in the Rajya Sabha, raised several questions regarding deaths caused due to cleaning of sewers and septic tanks. Ramdas Athawale, Minister of State in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment presented the reply.

Athawale, when questioned about the government’s awareness of the tragic deaths of four migrant workers in Gujarat while cleaning septic tanks, confirmed that the Gujarat government had indeed informed them about the incident but was vague about the compensation provided.

Further inquiries into the specific count of deaths in Gujarat revealed that, there were 58 reported deaths in the state within the last five years up to November 30, 2023. However, when probed about whether the majority of these fatalities were from marginalized communities such as Dalit/ST/Minority groups, Athawale stated that there is no centralised data available to indicate such a demographic trend.

The absence of both comprehensive data on such fatalities as also inconsistencies in compensation paid, across India, remains concerning. The disclosure of 58 reported deaths in Gujarat alone within the last five years underscores the urgency of addressing this issue.

The session highlighted the need for robust measures to prevent these tragic deaths and ensure the safety and dignity of those involved in this hazardous occupation. Moving forward, there is a crucial call for concerted efforts, policy interventions, and improved data collection mechanisms to address this pressing humanitarian concern and prevent further loss of life in these precarious work environments.

However, the absence of centralized data regarding the demographics of these victims, particularly those from marginalized communities, presents a significant challenge in understanding the full scope of this problem and implementing targeted interventions to safeguard vulnerable groups.

The complete answer can be viewed here:

Related:

Manual Scavenging: 4 die cleaning septic tank in Surat

Manual Scavenging: Eradicate the practice, ensure effective rehabilitation, scholarship, compensation, uphold dignity and liberty says SC

Eradicate manual scavenging completely says SC increasing compensation to families of workers who die at work to Rs 30 lakh

Manual Scavenging continues unabated, Indian Govts turns a deaf ear to acknowledge this systemic, extreme violence

Zero reported deaths due to manual scavenging: Ramdas Athawale

The post 58 reported deaths in Gujarat in last 5 years: Union Govt data reveals deaths due to cleaning of sewers and septic tanks appeared first on SabrangIndia.

While replying to a question tabled in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of Social Justice and Employment, Virendra Kumar, has informed the Parliament that 941 deaths related to cleaning sewers and septic tanks have been recorded across 21 States and Union Territories, but there are no reports of death due to manual scavenging. His response stated that as per the two surveys conducted by the local authorities in 2013 and 2018, as many as 58,098 persons have been identified as manual scavengers.

The Ministry’s written answer said, “There is no report of death due to manual scavenging”, but it revealed figures pertaining to deaths of workers while cleaning sewer/septic tanks. The highest number of deaths has been reported from the States of Tamil Nadu (213), followed by Gujarat (153), and then Uttar Pradesh (104).

In February this year, the government had said that the reported number of manual scavenging deaths stood at 340 across 19 States, with Uttar Pradesh topping the list at 52 deaths, as reported previously by SabrangIndia. However now, the stance seems to have changed. A few days ago, in a written response dated July 28, the Centre said “no such deaths have been reported”. This answer has once again been repeated through this recent response dated August 4.

The response received a backlash on Twitter and other social media platforms, with people calling out the government’s insensitivity to people dying while doing this work, which is illegal under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013.

Human Rights activist Bezwada Wilson, who is also the national convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, criticised the government for their lack of sensitivity and acknowledgment of the problem. He revealed that about 472 deaths from the year 2016 to 2020, and 26 deaths alone this year had been recorded due to manual scavenging. Further, he added that the details of all such incidents had also been sent to the Centre, but to no avail.

472 deaths from 2016 to 2020 and 26 deaths this year till date due to manual scavenging are recorded with details of each incident sent to central government! Still it keeps denying even a single death!! Shameful!!#ManualScavenging #stopkillingus

— Bezwada Wilson (@BezwadaWilson) July 31, 2021

Lies & blatant lies! Govt statement in parliament of no death due to #ManualScavenging in last 5 years is shameful as well as disrespectful to every person who died cleaning our shit! Its simply a cover-up of its own failure to stop deaths in sewers, septic tanks. #stopkillingus

— Bezwada Wilson (@BezwadaWilson) July 31, 2021

Wilson, while speaking to The Hindu, also said, “The statement itself is a very inhuman statement. The practice is inhuman of course, but the statement is very inhuman and cruel. They know that people died, and they reported it in the last Parliament, and now in this Parliament they are saying that nobody died.”

The answer may be read here: 

Related:

Centre claims that nobody died due to manual scavenging reported in the last 5 years!
Manual Scavengers: 340 deaths, yet Centre has no intention to make stricter laws!

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In response to a question related to manual scavenging, the government said that there are no reports regarding deaths of persons due to manual scavenging but admitted there have been deaths due to cleaning of sewers and septic tanks as recorded by National Commission for Safai Karamcharis. The PUDR report titled “Chronic ‘Accidents’: Deaths of Sewer/Septic Tank Workers, Delhi, 2017-2019” as contended that official bodies have attempted to create a false distinction between the manual scavengers and sewer/septic tank cleaners so as to give priority should be given to manual scavengers. PUDR argues that such official narratives cause sanitation workers to be relegated to the background and questions as to the rights of sewer workers are left out of the debate.

As per data from the Commission, 282 sewer deaths have taken place since 2016 until November 6, 2019 in the country. Out of these, families of 156 deceased persons have received compensation under the provisions of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. That is just bit more than half of the deceased persons families receiving such compensation.

About Manual Scavenging and sewer cleaning

On October 2, 2014, the Government of India launched the Swachh Bharat Mission with the aim to achieve universal sanitation coverage within five years as a “fitting tribute to Mahatma Gandhi” on his 150th Birth Anniversary in 2019. While the Government lauds the success of the Mission covering 99.2 per cent of rural India in the last four years, it glosses over how sanitation workers and manual scavengers are losing their lives maintaining sewers and septic tanks in the name of clean India.

Manual scavenging refers to the practice of manually sanitation work such as cleaning, carrying, disposing or handling human excreta from dry latrines and sewers and involves the use of basic tools such as buckets, brooms and baskets. The practice of manual scavenging is inextricably linked to India’s caste system where those born into the supposed lower castes, such as Valmiki or Hela, were made exclusively responsible to perform this job.

Sewer cleaning comes under the definition of “hazardous cleaning” which is defined as manual cleaning of sewer or septic tank by an employee without the employer fulfilling his obligations to provide protective gear and other cleaning devices and ensuring observance of safety precautions. There is however no rehabilitation provision for sewer cleaners

Rehabilitation under the Act

The Act provides for rehabilitation of persons identified as manual scavengers to give them a photo identity card, one-time cash assistance, scholarship for his children, allotment of residential plot, financial assistance for house construction, training in livelihood skill and other such social assistance. Out of 60,440 identified manual scavengers, 40,383 have received one-time cash assistance under the Act, the provision of the other rehabilitative measure is still unclear and so is the amount provided as one-time assistance.

Relevant point to note here is that the distinction made between a manual scavenger and a sewer cleaner has been deliberately made by the legislators and hence even in the parliament they have claimed that there have been no deaths due to manual scavenging.

Related:

Swachh Bharat: Who Will Clean & Empty Out 9.8 Crore Septic Tanks/Pits?

Public Hearing on Sewer Workers – Hearing the victims and their families

Manual Scavenging still on: How Swachh is GOI’s conscience?

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The Dalit Adivasi Shakti Manch (DASAM), along with other organizations in solidarity with sewer workers, has organized a Public Hearing of the plights of the victims of manual scavenging and their families to bring attention to the violation of the rights of sewer workers. The Public Hearing will be held on October 19, 2019 at Gandhi Peace Foundation, DeenDayalUpadhyayMarg, New Delhi.

Taking a serious view of death of manual scavengers, the Delhi High Court on 12th July 2019, asked the Delhi government and various other authorities to state on affidavit whether they were, directly or indirectly, hiring people to manually clean septic tanks and sewers.

The objective of the Public Hearing to be held on October 19, 2019 is to highlight the plight of the victims and their families and to look into the state’s response in providing them with rehabilitation and support, the existing dangers and loopholes in the work place which still exist even after giving machines for safer sewer work and why it has not reached the “real” worker.

Sewers in India are like gas chambers where manual scavengers are being sent to die, the Supreme Court remarked on September 18, 2019. “In no country, people are sent to gas chambers to die. Every month four to five persons are losing their lives in manual scavenging” the court said.

In 1993, India prohibited the employment of people as manual scavengers. In 2013, a landmark new legislation in the form of The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act was passed which reinforced prohibiting manual scavenging in all forms and rehabilitating manual scavengers. Why then is it still in practice?

The Act passed against the practise of manual scavenging has come to be better known for the frequency with which it is violated. Instead of the fundamental question of whether manual cleaning of sewers and septic tanks should be permitted or not, what rules public discussions are issues related to lack of safety gear and improper training of workers sent to clean sewers. A report by PUDR investigates this issue to probe what these deaths imply for democratic rights not just for the victims and their families, but also for the inhabitants of the city.

Manual scavengers have anyway been at a double disadvantage. First, they face enormous discrimination for being members of lower castes and second, because they are manual scavengers who clean human excreta.

Isn’t the ignorance of the civic system – in terms of providing basic safety gear to sanitation workers and the ignorance of the legal system – in terms of no criminal proceedings initiated against those deploying sanitation workers to work in hazardous conditions, a form of institutionalized violence against these workers? Do their lives not demand importance just because they are unfortunate victims of a caste system and failed urban planning?

Primary accountability of the sewerage and waste management systems is the State’s primary responsibility. It is urgent to factor in the repeated deaths of sanitation workers in the present and future policies of making India a clean country. It is imperative not only for the system, but also for inhabitants of the country to understand that the right to sanitation cannot be bought at the cost of the rights of sanitation workers.
 
Related
Manual Scavenging still on: How Swachh is GOI’s conscience?
“No other Country sends People to Gas Chamber”: SC on Sewer Deaths
 

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Image Courtesy: Vikas Choudhary

The Supreme Court today expressed serious concern over people dying during manual scavenging and sewage cleaning in India, saying nowhere in the world people are sent to “gas chambers to die”.

In the process of making scathing observations, the top court said though more than 70 years have passed since Independence, caste discrimination still persists in the country. A bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra questioned Attorney General KK Venugopal, appearing for the Centre, as to why proper protective gear like mask and oxygen cylinders were not being provided to people who are engaged in manual scavenging and cleaning of sewage or manholes.

“Why are you not providing them masks and oxygen cylinders? In no country in the world, people are sent to gas chambers to die. Four to five people are dying due to this every month,” the bench also comprising justices MR Shah and BR Gavai said.

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In a tragic incident, reported by PTI,  seven persons, including four sanitation workers, died due to asphyxiation on Saturday while cleaning sewer of a hotel in Gujarat’s Vadodara district, officials said.

The incident took place at a hotel in Fartikui village in Dabhoi tehsil, about 30 km from Vadodara city.The incident happened at a hotel in Fartikui village in Dabhoi tehsil, about 30 km from Vadodara city. Three employees of the hotel were also among those killed.

“When one sanitation worker failed to come out of the manhole, others went inside. All of them died due to asphyxiation,” district collector Kiran Zaveri told PTI.
 

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The Supreme Court had ruled that it is the duty of the state to protect the rights of every citizen and ensure that everyone is able to live with dignity. However, the Gujarat administration failed to read this and the incident took place 14km from law minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama’s constituency Dholka, Times of India reported.
 
“Human beings employed for doing work in the sewers cannot be treated as mechanical robots who may not be affected by poisonous gases in the manholes. The state and its agencies or contractors should ensure safety of persons asked to undertake hazardous jobs,” SC said.
 
“Given the option, no one would like to enter the manhole of sewage system for cleaning purposes, but there are people who are forced to undertake such hazardous jobs with the hope that at the end of the day they will be able to make some money and feed their family. They risk their lives for the comfort of others,” it said.
 

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Some people attained moksha (nirvana) while experiencing spirituality,

Protest against deaths in sewers, photo courtesy The Hindu

In his casteist book Karmayog, he wrote that manual scavenging is a spiritual experience, hence if some people die during cleaning sewers manually, that would be attaining moksha! In a caste Hindu society this should have been a matter of joy, that even in Kaliyuga, there are still some ‘pious’ soul who could give up all moh-maya and do this punya karma! How true this depiction/ description, one feels like saying: why not make the umpteen godmen-led spiritual movements in India take this route to spiritual moksha? This would perhaps have saved the many rapist-rioter babas from arrest and they could truly do their prayaschit (atonement) in these various, very Indian jails. This is after all the real world of this ‘spiritual experience’ of manual scavenging/sewer cleaning, where ‘Moksha’ means institutional killing!

The recent deaths of sewer workers in Delhi exposed this farce. These deaths are not mere work-place related accidents, but exposed the stinking caste biases of a rotten brahmanical social order! Only in September 2018, at least 11 workers died while cleaning either septic tanks or sewers. The issue of cleaning in general, and the issue of manual scavenging, in particular, has everything to do with the caste question. Not only is the work stigmatized but the workers are stigmatized as well – that is why Ambedkar asserted that caste is not merely the division of labour, it is also a division of labourers.

When these sewer cleaning workers died in Moti Nagar, Delhi, they were not wearing any safety equipment and succumbed to death after inhaling poisonous gases. It is not a secret anymore that private companies/contractors in the cleaning business very rarely provide safety measures/equipment to their workers. Even when they provide such equipment in one out of hundred cases, they are known to charge the workers for it. This has been the pattern in many other kinds of ‘menial’ work. After the workers died there should have been a case of culpable homicide against the contractor/s, but the police simply lodged a case of ‘negligence’ (an easily bailable offence). This is certainly not a case of ‘negligence’ which pertains to some unknown ‘human-error’, but is emphatically casteist, where state structures attribute sub-human status to Dalit lives which don’t deserve the faintest attention! It is matter of utter shame that we are witnessing all this in a country which is planning to introduce bullet trains and is developing space technology to go beyond the earth’s orbit but has developed scarcely any technology to clean beneath the earth! Had it been any upper/dominant caste cleaning the human excreta, there would have been 5th generation ultra nano technology in place for some years by now!

These deaths cannot be seen in vacuum but have to be viewed in the larger context of a complex web of caste atrocities by the ruling party and their ideological head Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh (RSS). Though caste prejudices and practices are not the preserve of the BJP/ RSS, there is something specific here that needs to be underlined. When BJP came into power in 2014, PM Modi started the Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan (clean India Campaign) with splendour, spending huge amounts of public money. There was (and still is) not any nook and corner where one can’t see the campaign’s billboard or a picture of the PM cleaning an already clean street in his expensive attire! Nevertheless, one would assume that there would be something for the historically marginalised Dalits who form the majority in cleaning work! But Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan turned out to be a farce and just a media gimmick where the government has spent more than 500 crores rupees just on advertising with nothing for the safety of cleaning workers or even to raise their minimum wages! Delhi itself has seen many cleaning workers strikes in last 4 years, due to non-payment of their salaries. This also says a lot about the insensitivity and casteist attitude of local bodies like MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) which is ruled by the right-wing BJP for last 15 years.

PM Modi claimed to come from a humble tea-seller background and from a backward caste. If one takes his word seriously, then the PM must have seen tea corner shops and how difficult it is to keep them clean day and night. One would think that he would be a little more sensitive towards manual scavenging work and the stigma attached with Dalits doing this work for ages! On the contrary, the famous ‘Gujarat Model’ showed that there is no space for Dalits there, when in 2016, 7 Dalit youth were flogged by gau-rakshaks (cow vigilantes). That was just the beginning of their aggressive attempts to defend the Brahminical social order through rampant cow-vigilantism. Even as PM Modi is evoking Dr. Ambedkar selectively, caste atrocity cases are on the rise in a state which is ruled by BJP for the last two decades.

I see this as calculated violence by the present regime at the instance of the RSS to suppress Dalit assertion. The examples are numerous and from various places. Whether it is the crackdown on Bhim Army, an active Dalit group that works for education of children from poor and marginal backgrounds in Uttar Pradesh; Bhima Koregaon in Maharashtra; or arrests made after the 2nd April All India protest, the repression speaks volumes about the kind of violence being perpetrated. The dilution and confusion created around the SC/ST Atrocities Act was also done to comfort their traditional savarna vote bank which has already taken a violent turn in many parts of the country. Through such moves, they are making a public constituency for anti-Dalit sentiments. One cannot forget the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University which completes the circle of anti-Dalit sentiment of the present regime, which doesn’t want Dalits to have a dignified life either in work or in education.

The BJP and RSS has been trying to appropriate Dalits through the agenda of ‘samajik samrasta’ (social harmony), which is nothing more than diluting radical Dalit politics. RSS has brought in fictional history books to claim that Hindu social structure is not vertical in nature, that instead it is horizontal, where there is a division of work that has nothing to do with one’s birth! The entire Hindu social structure is based on Karma (work) and not Janm (Birth). According to RSS history, it became a vertical order during the Muslim/Mughal period when Mughals invaded Bharat-Varsha (India) and disrupted the social order! However, the Vedic claim is different from this, where Dalits and women were kept on margins. The RSS claim does no good to Dalit assertion when one learns about the quotidian violence inflicted by savarna Hindus on Dalits – for ages and continuing today – for various reasons ranging from the simple act of wearing footwear to taking water from village waterbodies, from getting formal education to marrying a upper caste girl, from taking out marriage procession to temple entry.

It is not a coincidence that the humiliation of Dalits, one of the oldest surviving oppressed groups in the world, is enormous and has been sanctioned by Manu’s Law which happens to be the Holy book of the present regime, keeping Dalits perpetually on the verge of vulnerability. However, times are changing and Dalits assertion against this casteist regime is on the rise, both by denouncing the assigned marginality as well as asserting their rights as equals. As one of the slogans from Una Struggle rightly pointed out, Gai ki poonch tum rakho, hume hamari zameen do! (Keep the cow’s tail and give us our land!).

These deaths were neither the first and (unfortunately) nor the last! Every death is a shame on Government’s claim to digital India, to swachchh (clean) India, to Swasth (healthy) India. Dalits demand dignified material experience, instead this vacuous, Modi-style ‘spiritual’ experience.

The recent protest march against the killings of Dalit workers in sewers is a call for us as a society to stand up for workers who were restoring the flow of urban life but were failed by a State which brutally denied their life in return! Because, silence is not a solution! It never was! It never will be!

The writer is a research scholar in History and is interested in the question of Caste, Wrestling and Music.

Courtesy: Kafila.online
 

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Never mind that the law bans the entry of workers into manholes – except in cases of emergency, and not without proper safety gear.

Ten sanitation workers died inside sewers in a span of five weeks, from July 15 to August 20. One died at Lok Nayak Hospital, two at Funcity Mall, three at Lajpat Nagar, and four at Ghitorni – all while clearing manholes.

The latest victim of the sewers is Rishi Pal, father of three. Rishi and three other workers –Sumit, Bishan and Kiran – were called to clean the sewers at Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital on August 20, Sunday. They were sent inside the manhole without any safety gear.

A hospital, supposed to meticulously follow safety procedures, is careless and callous when it comes to providing basic necessary gear to protect workers.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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Image: BBC

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