When life goes down the drain
Manikandan, a former manual scavenger, shares with this newspaper his travails after losing the job of cleaning drains/septic tanks, fighting penury and the government’s failure to keep its promise of providing him a permanent job
The abolition of manual scavenging, through a law, has a dark side, too. It has suddenly rendered many men jobless, which in turn has wreaked havoc in the lives of their family members.
Take the case of 19-year-old Anupriya, who was forced to drop out of her nursing course. All because her father Y. Manikandan, who was into manual scavenging, lost his job last year and was unable to pay the course fees.
Father of four girls, Manikandan was taking care of his children, wife and mother when his photograph appeared in a newspaper in 2016, which changed his life.
In that picture Manikandan was standing in a manhole with the muck inside the drain reaching up to his neck. Soon activists and officials were at his doorstep, explaining that it was illegal for him to do a job like that after manual scavenging was abolished in 2014 through the introduction of Prohibition of Employment as manual Scavengers and Rehabilitation Act -2013.
Manikandan, a school dropout, had entered the job as a contractor lured him at the age of 17. His father was a daily wage worker and none of his siblings is into manual scavenging. He was well aware that it was a job done by a particular community but took it up as he had no other means of finding a livelihood.
So, even after he was told that he was doing something illegal, he continued to go out with contractors who offered him the work of entering cesspools to clear clogged drains and help the corporation maintain its underground drainage system. He was paid about `350 per job.
But Manikandan was the cynosure of the official eye and was keenly watched. Pressure from the authorities and activists, particularly Samuel Velanganni, state coordinator, Safai Karamcharis Andolan, continued. He was asked to give up the job.
On September 4, 2017, the Union ministry of social justice and empowerment directed the state Adi Dravda and Tribes Welfare Board to provide him a permanent job at the city’s slum management department. But till today the direction of Union ministry has not yielded any results despite Manikandan sending a reminder.
That left him with no option other than to go out when the contractors offered him work. But on day in 2019, an executive engineer of the Slum Clearance Board, Soundarajan, called him and gave him an ultimatum. He should not engage in the work he was doing. Simultaneously, the contractors, too, stopped calling him, leaving him jobless.
So the elder, who had studied reasonably well till her plus-2 and had joined the School of Nursing in Ranipet, had to drop out. For, could not find alternative employment, too, as he had been labelled a manual scavenger.
His other daughters are in school, studying in various classes, and he had pay a monthly rent of `2,500 for his dilapidated tenement. So his wife, Maniyammal, started working as a domestic maid to take care of the seven-member family.
‘I want an alternative job. I need to educate my kids and feed them on time. My kids are irregular in the school because I have nothing to feed on time. They suffer because I am jobless’, he laments.
According to him, there are many people who are still doing manual scavenging on the sly. “They continue to do the job as nobody calls them for work other than manual scavenging,” he reveals.
When he got job offers, till about a couple of years back, he would work on three to six septic tanks per day. He still keeps a diary on the work he did since 2014, in which both employer and service seeker had to sign.
He said that most of the contractors had refused to put their signature on record as they knew it would invite legal trouble.