Coming Soon – Hellhole: The Reality of Manual Scavenging in India

Who are India's manual scavengers and are they being unseen and undercounted?

Representative Image. 

(Image altered by Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Video Editor: Pawan Kumar

Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya & Athar Rather

(Since you have taken an interest in reading about manual scavengers, The Quint would like to draw your attention to an upcoming interactive on their plight. We would be grateful if you could support our special project titled Hellhole: The Reality of Manual Scavenging in India.)

Around 330 people died during "hazardous cleaning" of sewers and septic tanks in the last five years but “none of them were manual scavengers,” the central government said in the Parliament on 2 August 2022.

Addressing the Lok Sabha, Minister of State (MoS) for Social Justice and Empowerment, Ramdas Athawale, even went on to say that "there is no report of people engaged in manual scavenging as defined under Section 2 (1) (g) of the "Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013."

But despite the government's denial of manual scavengers, evidence on the ground suggests that many still continue doing a job that involves maximum risk and little reward – a job that was banned around 29 years ago.

In fact, as activist Pragya Akhilesh points out, one of the major hurdles in eradicating manual scavenging lies in its very official decision.

According to the prohibition of employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, a manual scavenger "means a person engaged or employed, at the commencement of this Act or at any time thereafter, by an individual or a local authority or an agency or a contractor, for manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling in any manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit into which the human excreta from the insanitary latrines is disposed of, or on a railway track or in such other spaces or premises, as the central government or a state government may notify, before the excreta fully decomposes in such manner as may be prescribed, and the expression “manual scavenging” shall be construed accordingly."

According to Akhilesh, the government has not only left sewer and septic tank cleaners outside the definition of manual scavenging, but has not included domestic cleaners, community toilet cleaners, and sanitation workers in schools.

The Quint's upcoming interactive titled 'Hellhole: The Reality of Manual Scavenging in India' explores not just the fault in the definition of the long-overlooked profession, but also delves deep into the lives of three manual scavengers – a sewer cleaner, a dry toilet cleaner, and a father who cleaned sewers and left behind three orphaned daughters after his demise – to understand the issues that plague them.

The following are the aspects that will be covered in the interactive.

• What is Manual Scavenging?

• When did it start?

• Why a Sewer Cleaner may not be called a Manual Scavenger

• Death by manual scavenging

• Do manual scavengers really exist?

• Can manual scavenging be eradicated?