Among the most suppressed persons anywhere in the world, it is people from the Dalit community who effectively end up cleaning India’s sewage and going down manholes to encounter toxic fumes and noxious gases. https://thewire.in/government/manhole-cover-a-symbol-of-how-the-most-depressed-sections-were-dealt-with-in-the-last-decade
The Safai Karamchari Andolan’s (SKA’s) numbers make it clear that this has not happened. The organisation calculates that there are “26,00,000 people involved in cleaning community dry latrines, 7,70,000 workers in sewer cleaning, 36,176 in manual scavenging at railway stations and nearly 1,760 individuals have lost their lives due to poisonous gases” in the process since 2000.
The misplaced anxiety of the Union government to falsely declare areas and even the country open defecation free and to insist that there are “no deaths” in the country due to manual scavenging have compounded the crisis. The government says deaths have occurred only while cleaning sewers and septic tanks, but activists insist that both are the same thing.
The caste dimension of India’s massive sanitation crisis was not made explicit when Swachh Bharat was launched. It soon degenerated into the prime minister, other senior ministers and politicians sweeping floors with large brooms, and in some cases, clearing strategically placed trash or dry leaves.
“Without explicitly tying the sanitation and manual scavenging crisis in India with caste, Modi spent Rs 2 lakh crore on it. But India lost the opportunity to go to the heart of the problem, dip deep and do genuine soul-searching and make India clean,” Wilson said.
28/05/2024