The relatives of thousands of people who died cleaning sewers protested in New Delhi yesterday, aiming to stop the practice of workers entering underground conduits to unclog drains and remove waste with their bare hands.
Hundreds of protesters shouted slogans accusing the government of delaying compensation for sewer deaths, while others waved banners saying they came as Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushes his “Swachh Bharat,” or “Clean India”, programme.
“I lost my only son,” said Saroj, a mother among the protesters, who hails from the northern city of Ludhiana in Punjab.
“He went into the sewers and never came out. How long will these deaths continue?”
One placard read, “Eleven workers died in the sewers in seven days. ‘Swachh Bharat’ for whom?”
“It’s a grave injustice that this is still happening,” Santosh, a daily-wage labourer from Delhi who came to show solidarity, said.
“There can’t be more orphans because of this. There can’t be more children who lose their parents, more wives who lose their husbands, more sisters who lose their brothers. It has to stop,” he said.
“Nowadays the government says so much about ‘Swachh Bharat’ – but it doesn’t have a word to say about manual scavengers. We are not asking them for money! We are asking for basic human rights.” About 1,800 sewers cleaners have asphyxiated to death in the last decade, says the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), a group that is campaigning to eliminate the practice.
Most of the roughly 160,000 workers involved in cleaning human waste are women, it added.
In 1993, India outlawed what it calls “manual scavenging”, a practice that includes the barehanded cleaning of dry latrines, mostly by women and Dalits.
For centuries, Dalits have battled discrimination ranging from segregation and ostracism to violence. “The problem is apathy, clear government apathy. And behind that apathy is India’s caste system,” Swaraj India leader Yogendra Yadav said.
One of the demands raised at the protest was the need for mechanisation in sanitation work.
“We’ve all heard of Rafale planes and bullet trains. But how many of us have heard of the machines that clean sewers? Do we even know what they’re called?” Nikhil Dey of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan said.
“This shows you the Modi government’s focus – where they’re putting their time and their money. They have money for technology that will kill people and displace people, but not for technology that could regularly save sewer workers’ lives. What kind of government is this?”
Puranmal from Rajasthan’s Karauli district said he, and several other men in his families, have been working as manual scavengers for decades.
Family members of sanitation workers attend a protest against the rising deaths of people cleaning sewers, in New Delhi yesterday.
