DISCRIMINATION FORCING THOSE WHO OPTED OUT OF SCAVENGING BACK IN

LUCKNOW: Roma Valmiki became a celebrity in 2013 when she gave up manual scavenging, becoming one of the 50-odd people to be given a central government grant to find an alternative occupation to the caste-based practice of cleaning excreta by hand.

“I still remember the day my photograph got published in a newspaper. It was a petty amount but my family was happy as after 16 years, I was freed from the profession,” Roma recollected.

She was given `40,000 as part of a drive launched to eliminate manual scavenging and provide for the rehabilitation of the mostly Dalit workers.

But her dream of a new life turned into a nightmare. She opened a makeshift shop selling vegetables but no one, not even local residents, turned up because they didn’t want to buy food from a Dalit woman.

“It was a setback as our locality is densely populated but nobody turned up, barring our community,” said Roma.

The vegetables got spoiled and the shop had to be shut down in a few days. “It was then I decided to close the shop and to switch back to my old profession as society was not ready to accept us,” she added.

The 30-something woman is not the only one. Most of the 53 people given the government grant in Lucknow haven’t been able to make alternative livelihoods because of pervasive casteism and have been forced back into manual scavenging.

Roma said she made the switch because she would earn more. “On an average, we get `20 per person in a family,” she said. She hails from Valmiki Puri, a locality of manual scavengers in old Lucknow, and says manual scavengers are treated no better than outcasts.

The Akhil Bhartiya Safai Majdoor Sangh (ABSMS) — a union of manual scavengers — says social discrimination and administrative apathy forced the workers to go back to the banned practice

“Is it possible to start a business in just `40,000, that too given over four installments?” asked Shyam Lal Valmiki, national general secretary of the ABSMS.

Lucknow chief development officer Prashant Sharma has now ordered a re-survey of manual scavengers after demands by the ABSMS.