Editorial: Undignified death in the drain

We are a country that loses little time to produce a howling irony to lay bare our hypocrisy each time we puff ourselves up on some high principle.

How else can you see the death of three sewage workers in Kolkata last Sunday, just five days after the Supreme Court ordered six metro cities to enforce the complete ban on manual scavenging and sewage cleaning? The three workers were clearing a clogged manhole at a leather tannery when one of them tripped and fell into the effluent and the other two jumped in to save him. All three succumbed to the poisonous vapours.

This is of course a recurring shame. While our municipalities are too coy to keep a count of such deaths despite being brazen enough to hire manual cleaners illegally, more than 1,500 workers have died unclogging our manholes since the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act was enacted in 2013. And each time such an incident occurs, the authorities rush to pay the victims’ families hush money clothed as ex gratia (Rs 10 lakh in this case) and pay lip service that is just adjacent to victim blaming. In this case, the mayor of Kolkata was heard grumbling that “manual scavengers sometimes disregard safety procedures”. There is no responsibility pinned on anyone for violating the standing law and for bypassing safety regulations.

When the apex court bench convened last Wednesday to hear an update on the implementation of the ban on manual scavenging and sewer cleaning, the judges asked the civic authorities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad to submit by Feb 13 detailed affidavits on how and when manual scavenging was stopped in their jurisdictions. The Kolkata incident makes it clear that the judges are being optimistic if they expect any progress to be reported.

When held to account on this disgrace, the government and municipalities’ default approach is to try to be clever. In the hearing last week, the Union government stated that 456 of the 775 districts in India reported no cases of manual scavenging or manual sewer cleaning. It was a legal dodge. Most of those district administrations had not even set up committees to monitor and check the practice and therefore nothing was reported. Hopefully, when the Supreme Court conducts its next hearing on Feb 19, the judges will administer a shock severe enough to jolt the municipalities into real action. Obviously, the problem needs a 360-degree approach but making it expensive for municipalities to flout the ban is a good place to start. We must ensure that public and private entities that employ manual scavengers are held legally accountable and made liable for harsh penalties and criminal charges.

Putting this problem out forever demands modernization of the sanitation infrastructure. This, however, must not be held out as a recommendation to municipalities, to be implemented if the funds allow it, but as a mandate to be obeyed.

The use of mechanized sewage cleaning equipment should not be left to the discretion of an official. Obviously, funding is an issue, but the means will materialise if the intent is willy-nilly. It would also be good to subject municipalities to an audit by independent agencies countrywide.

It’s not enough to be horrified by India’s continued reliance on medieval practices. The greater shame is in doing nothing about it.