The not-so-swachh life of the Railways’ cleaners

NEW DELHI, September 5, 2016

Sidhartha Roy

Safai Karamcharis, who keep the tracks clean of filth round the clock, are the ignored foot soldiers of the massive Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan.

Most people just look the other way.

Santosh Kumar* (38), however, walks down the rail track next to platform 13 of the New Delhi railway station. His is face an inscrutable mask as he begins cleaning the track — leftover food, plastic bottles, packets, paper boxes — and human excreta. Remains of a train that has ended its journey.

The railway tracks, which resemble a garbage dump, are Mr. Kumar’s workplace for 12 hours a day and have been so for a decade now. Safai Karamcharis is the tag given to Mr. Kumar and his co-workers, who get a monthly remuneration of Rs. 8,500 for their efforts to keep the railway tracks clean. The money is barely enough to make ends meet, but for a man un-educated, avenues of employment are limited.

The Safai Karamcharis are the foot soldiers of the Indian Railway's massive cleanliness drive as part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, who keep the tracks clean of filth round the clock. Every day, a staggering 300 trains enter and leave the New Delhi railway station; five lakh passengers pass through the station. It is the responsibility Mr. Kumar and his colleagues to keep it clean — they are employed by private contractors to whom the Indian Railways has outsourced the work.

They work with their bare hands, wearing uniforms that are soiled. Armed with brooms and gunny sacks, the sweepers brave infections and disease every day as they wade through filth wearing only slippers. The gloves and boots provided to them are uncomfortable and of poor quality and hence generally not used.

In denial

The Railway Ministry categorically denies their existence. But they are manual scavengers. For Mr. Kumar, it provides a livelihood that he hates. “Sometime the water doesn’t get the job done or the drains get clogged. That is when we have to scoop up the excreta with ply boards, using our hands,” he said, matter-of-factly.

The Parliament may have banned manual scavenging, with the passage of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, but the Railways employs them, albeit having outsourced the task. On Wednesday last week, a Delhi High Court bench, headed by Justice B.D. Ahmed, directed both the AAP government and Centre to file an affidavit indicating the steps taken under the law, particularly under Section 36 of the Act.

The High Court was hearing a petition filed by an NGO — National Campaign for Dignity and Rights of Sewerage and Allied Workers — on rehabilitation of manual scavengers in Delhi. The court expressed its “shock and disquiet” when a report by the Delhi State Legal Services Authority showed that several thousand persons were working as manual scavengers in the national Capital. The report stated that these were working with the Delhi Jal Board, municipal corporations, Railways or for contractors hired by these agencies in 30 out of 104 wards in Delhi.

The High Court’s direction holds hope for Mr. Kumar and his team for better protective gear and hopefully, a better life. “Our hands get infected all the time and recurring fevers are a part of life but there is nothing you can do; the job has to be done,” he said. Being exposed to germs and infections has meant that most of the sweepers suffer from bouts of jaundice. “It would be nice if we could be provided with face masks,” he said.

“The gloves tear easily and the boots gave me sores when I tried wearing them for work. Also, it gets very difficult to scoop up garbage while wearing gloves as it makes hand movements difficult,” said Raju* (25), another sweeper.

“It is stipulated in the tender conditions of the contractor that they have to provide protective gear such as gloves and boots. It is possible that the contractor is at fault,” said a senior commercial officer of the Railways’ Delhi Division.

The day of a railway sweeper starts very early and since most of them live in peripheral areas of Delhi as they can’t afford to pay too much rent, quite a few hours are spent on the daily commute.

Mr. Kumar lives in Narela, 40 km from the New Delhi Railway Station. “I wake up at 3.30 a.m. and leave my house in time to catch the bus at 5 a.m. I reach the railway station by 6.30 a.m. when my shift starts. I take a bus back to home after 6.30 p.m.,” he said. “By the time I return, I have no energy left to even talk to my children. It’s just eating and going to sleep again to wake up for the next day’s shift,” he said.

The stigma attached

Manoj Kumar (35), lives in a village in Haryana and the long commute and 12 hour shifts means he doesn’t get to spend time with his family either. When he first got the job five years ago, he didn’t know how to break the news to his family. “I was ashamed to tell them that I would have to pick up garbage. Though now they know, my neighbours and relatives still don’t know what I exactly do at the railway station,” he said.

More than gloves and boots, however, it is the low salary and long working hours that perturbs the sweepers of New Delhi railway station. “Our salaries should be hiked keeping in mind the inflation and also, if I get more time for myself, I would like to spend it with my wife and two children,” Mr. Manoj Kumar said.

“When I reach home exhausted and reeking of garbage, my wife doesn’t let me go near my children before I take a thorough bath for fear of an infection,” he said. “The stench, however, is the last to leave my body.”

*Names have been changed to protect the workers’ identity

Source: thehindu

Mind the gap: Why the decline of Harappan civilisation sent India's sewage system down the drain

Anything that moves

How did a country home to the world's oldest sophisticated toilets became the ground for Bezwada Wilson's battle against manual scavenging?

Image credit:  Haseeb Ur Rehman Malik/via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday · 08:00 am 

Girish Shahane

Bezwada Wilson richly deserves the Ramon Magsaysay Award, announced on July 27, for his efforts to eliminate the removal of human excrement by hand, mostly by workers belonging to the Dalit caste.

We call the practice manual scavenging, which is rather inexplicable because scavengers rescue things that have been discarded but retain some use or resale value – and fecal sludge extracted from dry latrines possesses neither of those qualities.

It is bitterly ironic that the land where sophisticated toilets were believed to have been first invented and used is also the place where the most primitive means of defecation and waste disposal are most prevalent in the 21st Century.

Past perfect?

The sewage systems of Indus Valley cities are famous for good reason – nothing comparable has been discovered in Mesopotamia or Egypt. About 4,500 years ago, most Harappan homes were equipped with toilets that connected to waterproof drains, which conveyed waste water to cesspits or beyond city limits.

The cesspits needed to be cleaned regularly, as did the sewers, but that was a job entrusted to teams of labourers working in tandem.

Each city was a comprehensive unit laid out in a precise grid, administered by one authority overseeing the functioning of public utilities in a manner not dissimilar to modern metropolises.

One can state this with some confidence despite having no access to any records kept by the Harappan people, for the design of towns such as Harappa, Dholavira and Mohenjo-daro tell a detailed story.

Dholavira, Mohenjo-daro and habitations across the region were laid out in uniform grids, built using baked bricks of identical size and shape, and containing similarly sophisticated drainage systems. The Indus Valley civilisation declined for reasons that are not fully apparent but probably involved a combination of climate change, chronic drought and broken trade links.

Rising from the ruins

There is a yawning temporal and geographical gap between the long slide of Harappa, which lasts for 500 years from around 1800 BCE, and the rise of the kingdoms and cities of the Indo-Gangetic plain circa 600 BCE.

Strangely, this period of urban decline is also one of tremendous religious and philosophical development. Even as great cities crumbled and died and settlements shrank to the size of villages, the literary output of the subcontinent flourished, culminating in the mature Hindu, Buddhist and Jain philosophical texts and treatises that continue to fascinate us today.

It is unusual, if not unique, for degeneration and blossoming to go hand-in-hand in this fashion. Alongside the efflorescence of spiritual and ritual texts, a crucial technological step is achieved – the harnessing of iron, resulting in the start of what has come to be known as the Iron Age.

While vegetation around the Indus valley was sparse, the plains of North India were now covered with thick jungle that only a combination of iron and fire could render fit for agriculture. The new towns that were built on cleared forest land looked very different from those to the West that preceded them by over a millennium.

Homes and city walls were built of wood rather than brick, streets were rather haphazard instead of being organised in a strict grid, with no discernable plan encompassing an entire settlement.

Sewage canals with carefully calculated gradients running the length of breadth of the city were absent. Instead of being transported away by gravity, waste collected in pots dug into the ground. Vertical disposal had replaced horizontal. It required no complex planning, investment or teamwork to run this individualised system – just people tasked with cleaning out excrement.

Flushed away

A four-fold hierarchy determined the shape of the new urban agglomerations. People of the same group clustered together, wanting little to do with others. There was no question of a single overarching plan encompassing the entire settlement.

Ultimately, those who cleaned out the waste and got rid of bodies of humans and carcasses of dead cows, as well as a few others whose work was considered unclean, were excluded completely from the city’s ambit. In the greatest indignity ever invented for a group of humans by another, their touch, or even their presence was deemed to pollute the so-called high-born.

And that’s the India that is all too familiar to us even today, the India that Wilson and his ilk are trying to make slightly less inhumane.

Back to the future

What is the connection, if any, between the cities of the Indus Valley, whose careful planning we are so far from being able to emulate, and the easily recognisable India of profound philosophical speculations and dreadful social divisions first discerned in the Indo-Gangetic plain some 2,600 years ago?

Was it the same people, retaining the same belief systems, who eventually recovered from the desertification of their erstwhile habitat and established new centres in the East? Or did the system of hereditary social stratification, of caste, enter the equation in the millennium between decline and rise, along with new myths and new gods?

I’ve hinted where I stand in what has become a heated debate about the origins of Indian and Hindu beliefs. I believe that if Wilson could be placed in a time machine and transported to Lothal 4,500 years ago, he would find no reason to be an activist of the kind he is, for he would encounter a very different civilisation based on a very different set of values.

Next week, I will explain why I think so.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

Govt. job portal lists manual scavenging as ‘career option’

Mohit M. Rao

BENGALURU, August 4, 2015

Cleaning of sewers, descending into manholes, removing night-soil (human excreta) using a broom find 
a place in the National Career Services portal.

The job profile of a “Safai Karamchari” and a “scavenger” is listed as being “mildly hazardous or dangerous” – putting them in the same category as “astrologer”

What was conceived by the Narendra Modi-led NDA government as bringing employers and job seekers on a single platform, seems to now promote and allow the hiring of the prohibited act of manual scavenging at the click of a button.

Cleaning of sewers, descending into manholes, removing night-soil (human excreta) using a broom find a place in the National Career Services portal that was launched recently as a part of Skill India.

For instance, under the ‘unorganised sector’ panel of the website, a “Sweeper, Sewer” is “expected to” clean sewage systems by “using various cleaning instruments,” including bamboo or iron rod, and collecting debris and refuse in a bucket using a spade and handing this bucket to “helper outside manhole.”

Similarly, the “Sweeper, Wet” description lists a “key competency” of removing “night soil using spade and broom.”

On its launch by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 20, the portal was to link two crore job seekers with nearly nine lakh establishments. Mr. Modi had then said: “…it is essential for Indian society to develop a consciousness towards ‘dignity of labour’.”

However, advocates Clifton D’ Rozario and Maitreyi Krishnan — who had taken the issue of manual scavenging to the Karnataka High Court — say: “These dehumanising [definitions] are the very practice due to which the manual scavenging community has been stigmatised, ostracised and discriminated. [It] is now being proudly promoted as a ‘career option’.”

Furthermore, employing persons under these definitions have been made punishable with imprisonment under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, the advocates say.

‘Inhuman practice’

They also point to the Supreme Court order (dated March 27, 2014) in the Safai Karamchari Andolan vs. Union of India case, where the court observes that handling human excrements with bare hands, brooms or metal scrappers or in baskets is an “inhuman practice,” while in November 2008, the Chennai High Court had directed that the cleaning of sewage could only be through mobile mechanical pumps or other devices.

Acknowledging that the description did indeed become promotion of manual scavenging, M. Shivanna, Chairperson, National Safai Karamchari Commission, said, “This is definitely wrong, and amounts to promoting such activities. Though we have been insisting that Sucking and Jetting Machines should be used, the website implies that descending into manholes is also a part of the job.”

The commission will issue a notice seeking clarification on Wednesday, he told The Hindu.

In same league as astrologers

Incredibly, the job profile of a “Safai Karamchari” and a “scavenger” is listed as being “mildly hazardous or dangerous” — putting them in the same category as “astrologer” and “palmist” that come under unorganised sector careers.

While the risks for “Safai Karamchari” include “lung, respiratory, neurological diseases, infection, biological diseases, suffocation, fatigue,” for an astrologer or palmist or money lender, the dangers include “heart diseases, depression and anxiety, fatigue, stress.”

The website similarly contains unfortunate, now antiquated phrases for describing jobs. “Domestic Servant” is described as “performing the general house-hold duties and attending to the personal comforts of master or employer” — terms that show “underlying feudalism,” say advocates Clifton D’ Rozario and Maitreyi Krishnan.

Source: thehindu