Survey to identify manual scavengers

NEWDELHI: THE EXERCISE WITH AN AIM TO DETERMINE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN MANUAL SCAVENGING WILL BEGIN IN JANUARY

The Union government will begin in January an exercise to determine how many people still work as ‘manual scavengers’, a degrading occupation in which mostly men from lower castes remove untreated human excreta from places such as open pits, septic tanks, railway tracks and sewers.

India outlawed manual scavenging in 2013 but the practice is commonplace with no accurate picture of how prevalent it is. Every year, several workers die from noxious gases in places like sewers, which they enter without protective gear.

According to a source in the ministry of social justice and empowerment – the department responsible for rehabilitating the workers, the surveys will be launched in particular districts and will at first cover only limited forms of the occupation. Those who clean night soil — buckets and cesspools in which excreta is collected overnight — and pit latrines will be surveyed in the first phase, and people involved in cleaning septic tanks, sewers, railways tracks and platforms will be counted in the next.

“Both the government and the non-government sector feels that there could be more people involved in manual scavenging. Many states, despite Centre’s reminders, failed to update lists and maintain that there are no manual scavengers,” said the official.

According to data till December 10, there are 13,411 people who have been identified in the occupation statutory towns across the country. As many as 13 states, including Gujarat, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, have not sent reports to the centre on the status of implementing the provisions of the 2013 ban, ministry officials said.

Ending manual scavenging and enforcing the law is also part of the government’s Swachh Bharat (Clean India) initiative, which eyes a 2019 target to eradicate open defecation and build toilets.