Mobilenews24x7 Bureau
It was in July 28 the Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment Ramdas Athawale said that no deaths have been reported due to manual scavenging in the past five years.
The statement from the minister was perplexing for many and in comparison to the ground reality.
Then who all died taking the number of such deaths to a whopping 400 and odd. Were they not accounted for as human beings and manual scavengers?
Who are they to be considered as manual scavengers?
“The actual number is 472 and not 340, according to our data. The data in the last Parliament session counted 132 fewer deaths than the actual number.” Bezwada Wilson, national convener of the Safai Karmachari Andolan(SKA).
Quite in contrary to that according to the data presented by the central government in the Lok Sabha in February this year, 340 people had lost their lives while cleaning sewers and septic tanks across the country during the last five years, up to 31 December 2020.
As per SKA’s website, manual scavenging includes workers engaged in cleaning drains, sewers, septic tanks, railway tracks, among others. It further notes that 98 percent of the people involved in manual scavenging are women and Dalits and that the caste system is such that “only people of certain Dalit sub-castes” clean others’ excreta.
Shocking that the Govt does not consider the cleaners of sewers as not manual scavengers!]
Which means that the government does not recognise people who regularly enter septic tanks and sewers for cleaning or maintenance as manual scavengers.
As per a research paper published a news paper, in 2020, of the 1.2 million manual scavengers in India, 95-98 percent are women who belong to the following castes: Valmikis, Haila and Halalkhor castes, and from Mister and Dome castes.
“They are untouchables among untouchables, and are located at the lowest rung of the social order, and are ostracised by Dalits themselves,” the paper titled as ‘Manual Scavenging: Women Face Double Discrimination as Caste and Gender Inequalities Converge’ added. To read through the MS Act 2013, that deems manual scavengers to be persons engaged or employed by an individual or local authority for “manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling, in any manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in open drain” before it fully decomposes.
To read through the MS Act 2013, that deems manual scavengers to be persons engaged or employed by an individual or local authority for “manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling, in any manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in open drain” before it fully decomposes.
Regressive that “”Those born into these castes are forced to do manual scavenging until they die,” the website added.
