Manual scavenging: India’s dark story

India’s worst kept secret is its inability to eradicate manual scavenging, the medieval practice that forces workers to clean waste and faeces by hand. Despite a ban enforced eight years ago and several awareness campaigns, it remains pervasive in cities. Last week, the government confirmed another facet of this practice — an overwhelming number of manual scavengers are Dalits: 97% of those identified in surveys were from Scheduled Castes.

The revelation underlines how caste continues to operate, where this dehumanising job is reserved for the lowest castes, because of socioeconomic marginalisation and caste-based links of purity and pollution. It shows how successive administrations have failed in uprooting this practice, with measures for rehabilitation of people engaged in manual scavenging having largely remained on paper. It also shines a light on the grim underbelly of urban infrastructure, dependent on the manual labour of downtrodden communities locked in generations of exploitative employment with little chance of breaking through the barriers erected by caste.

In the absence of a robust implementation of the 2013 Prohibition of Employment As Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, manual scavengers have been eradicated mostly in name, and are known as safai karamcharis and sanitation workers, who regularly make the news due to their grisly deaths while cleaning sewers. Firmer law enforcement, acknowledgement of caste dynamics, humane and economically sound rehabilitation and truly emancipatory use of technology to deploy cleaning machines can make a start in fulfilling the constitutional promise of right to life and dignity.