They sweat, toil, even die for Swachh Mumbai

mandate benefits and rights to establishments with more than 20. A contractor takes them off the rolls before they complete 240 days and rehires them after a gap because otherwise he would have to, according to the Industrial Disputes Act, make them permanent employees.

This is an exploitative, malicious, illegal and unjust arrangement but it suits everyone involved – except, of course, the safai karmacharis.

Ten years ago, some 2,700 of them helped by their union approached the industrial tribunal.

In October 2014, the tribunal ruled in their favour granting them permanent employment with the BMC and all applicable benefits. What did the BMC do? It appealed against the order in the Bombay High Court. In December last year, the HC too ruled in the workers’ favour.

The BMC appealed in the Supreme Court which dismissed the petition last week. It is anybody’s guess if the BMC will implement the orders immediately but this case opened the avenue for nearly 3,000 workers whose cases are pending in the tribunal. This is still 10 per cent of all conservancy workers.

As Mumbaiikars, you would have to wonder what compelled the BMC to behave the way it did – and does – with those on the bottom rung of the class, perhaps caste, and work ladder. Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta has grand plans to make Mumbai clean: build toilets in slums, replace 3,000 open garbage bins with closed compactors, install new garbage processing stations, and so on, while completing the paperwork required to get a Swachh Bharat rank. Mumbai was placed 10th in India last year.

But Mehta fought tooth and nail in the courts to deny the safai workers their rights. The Swachh Bharat rank is coveted, clean Mumbai is important, but those who work for it are treated like, well, dirt. How much more dichotomous and unethical can the BMC be? Or the question to ask: Who benefits from this pernicious exploitative system? That pervasive contractor-corporator-official nexus, perhaps?