Beyond missing numbers, caste discrimination: Why manual scavenging continues years after abolition

Forty-five-year old Anthaiah went missing while cleaning a septic tank in Hyderabad last year. After a complaint by the Dalit man’s family, civic officials rummaged through a pipeline, a lake nearby, but only managed to find his body six days later in a sewer line after they used a camera. Efforts to retrieve the body had gained momentum after an opposition uproar, amid allegations by Anthaiah’s family that the municipality was turning a blind eye because of their caste identity.

But it was not just a missing body, it symbolised India’s manual scavenging crisis, of missing numbers, caste discrimination, and a seemingly shoddy official response towards the existence of a practice long abolished by law.

Manual scavenging, or cleaning up of dry latrines, was abolished in 1993. In 2013, the scope of the law was widened by including provisions of rehabilitation, expanding the definition of manual scavengers, and acknowledging caste identity, under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act. However, nine years after this legislation, the challenge remains enormous as Anthaiah’s case and other incidents reflect.

Sample the deaths. Union social justice minister of state Ramdas Athawale had in February last year told the Lok Sabha that 340 people had died while cleaning sewers or septic tanks in the last five years. However, he denied any death linked to manual scavenging in the Rajya Sabha in July. Even his earlier statement was an underestimate, if compared to figures by organisations such as the Safai Karmachari Andolan.

Beyond the missing numbers are also denied opportunities as traditional caste-based occupations continue to stay grounded within Indian societies. Tasks such as cleaning and disposing of human excreta through manual labour, disposing of the carcasses of dead animals, among other activities are regarded as too “impure” for other castes, or rather “upper-castes”, to participate in. Even though the law provides for rehabilitation, it remains difficult for lower castes to find alternate sources of income due to discrimination. The data gives a slice of the caste dynamics too.

In December, Athawale informed the Rajya Sabha that 73.31 percent, or 42,594 of 58,098, of manual scavengers in India come from the SC communities.

The Socio-Economic Caste Census of 2011 had identified 26 lakh insanitary latrines and 80,843 manual scavengers in the country, with the highest numbers reported from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.

Of the total 40,953 in Maharashtra, 6,008 were Scheduled Castes (SCs) and 5,941 were from the Scheduled Tribes (STs). There were 3,226 SCs and 4,731 STs of the total 15,451 manual scavengers in Madhya Pradesh. Bihar and Jharkhand reported 4,252 and 1,265 manual scavengers, respectively, with 516 and 145 of them, respectively, from the SC community.

“What else can we do? We are helpless. We do not have proper employment or a salary,” said Suresh, a sanitation worker residing in Kartik Nagar of Jharkhand’s Bokaro.

Chandan, who has been working with the Safai Karmachari Andolan since 2018, said manual scavengers “who do this task cannot, or rather won’t be able to, perform it without being under the influence of alcoholic substances, because of the nature of the task being severely toxic and dangerous”. This also results in blurry vision, hair fall, skin irritation, and other skin-related problems among workers, he said, adding that their families do not receive the compensation they are entitled to due to lack of documentation.

Recalling the death of two workers over 10 years ago in a clothing store in Bokaro while they were inside the sewer, he said those who hired the men gave around Rs 12,000 to the families of the deceased to avoid police probe.

“The task of sanitation has been imposed over the scheduled castes for centuries. Even today, regardless of the educational qualifications of a scheduled caste person, they’re deemed fit only for the task of cleaning,” he said.

A survey for the Sanitation Workers Project, in 2017, estimated that there were around 50 lakh sanitation workers in India, with nearly 25 lakh working under highly hazardous conditions.

But Chandan claims the existence of manual scavengers is often denied by officials. “In documented official records, you’ll often find an absolute absence of sanitation workers. When we lodge an RTI…we receive the response that there are no sanitation workers in the entire district. So to prove the existence of the workers, we conduct surveys.” He alleges that this is done so as funds meant for the rehabilitation of manual scavengers and their families remain unutilised.

Dharam Valmiki, the Jharkhand convener of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, said, “When we ask officials for information on the rehabilitation of the manual scavengers, they tell us that there are no manual scavengers so ‘who do we rehabilitate?’.”

This concern was raised strongly by the National Human Rights Commission last year too. “Many states make tall claim that they have zero manual scavengers and nil insanitary latrines but these are far from truth. Therefore, the commission has recommended that accountability must be fixed in case of wrong reporting by the concerned authorities about the number of manual scavengers in any region of the country,” it said during a workshop.

It also recommended that the National Crime Research Bureau monitor sewer deaths and put out a report on such data.

However, the NCRB, since 2017, has stopped recording the number of cases filed under the manual scavenging law separately in its main report; cases under the Act have been merged with those under ‘other special and local laws’.

Even the Swachhata Abhiyaan app, launched by the government in December 2020, to record data on insanitary latrines and manual scavengers has not confirmed even one of the 6,000 cases uploaded on it so far.

And in the absence of data, schemes for rehabilitation of manual scavengers also perform poorly. In its report for the year 2019-2020, the standing committee on social justice and empowerment also flagged the problem, asking why only 2,660 manual scavengers were provided skill development training of the 42,303 identified during the last national survey. It noted that one-time cash assistance of Rs 40,000 was only provided to 428 manual scavengers. It blamed state governments and local authorities for “deficient information”. It identified a total of 63,246 manual scavengers till March 2020, in sharp contrast with the figures of the SECC.

“There are 718 districts in the country but the survey was carried out in 170 districts only,” noted the annual report of the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, a statutory body.

Other sources of income

Other activities that the ST and SC communities are engaged in for income range from casual labour and cultivation to salaried jobs in different sectors, among others. As per the SECC 2011 data, of the 3,61,83,747 SC and 1,99,78,076 ST households, casual labour stands as the primary source of income for 24,934,236 and 10,214,660 of these, respectively. ‘Casual labour’ refers to labourers whose employment is intermittent, infrequent, or extends over a short period or continued across multiple tasks.

But this does not necessarily mean their absolute exclusion from tasks related to sanitation.

About gender too

In 2018, the India Development Review conducted a baseline survey in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, pointing to an overwhelming presence of women in tasks linked to manual scavenging. It also recorded a significant amount of violence﹘emotional, psychological, financial and physical﹘with the accused being employers or members of other castes in a majority of cases.

For cleaning of open drains, 257 of the 286 people employed were women, while 882 women of the total 956 manual scavengers surveyed were engaged in cleaning dry latrines. The report stated that only six safai karamcharis were able to study after completing class 12.

As per a study conducted by Dalberg Advisors in 2017, nearly 50 percent of urban sanitation workers are women mostly engaged in cleaning school toilets.

At the intersection of gender and caste, it is the women from the scheduled castes who are widely engaged in manual scavenging today.

“Caste should not be the determining factor…if a single person takes the leadership to improve their situation, I can confidently claim that it would get a lot better in a year if done properly,” Dharam said.

This report is published as part of the Newslaundry-India Data Portal Data Journalism Fellowship 2022.