dna edit: Death, ghastly and needless

The stench of death enveloped the heart of Lutyens Delhi on Sunday evening. Three manual scavengers died inside a sewer at the prestigious Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts. It was not just asphyxia from inhaling poisonous gases after entering a manhole that ended their lives. Their deaths were caused by the state. To be more precise, the utter, and contemptuous, failure of the state and central government to heed High Court (HC) and Supreme Court (SC) orders and its own laws outlawing the inhuman practice.

In July 2011, an SC bench directed governments to provided safety gear including gas masks to people who enter manholes. Before that, in November 2008, the Madras HC banned sewage manhole and septic-tank cleaning. The Delhi and Gujarat HCs too advocated the safety of sanitary workers. In 1993, Parliament passed the Employment of Manual Scavengers Act outlawing manual scavenging. But this toothless Act left out modern practices like entering manholes. In February 2013, the Delhi government banned manual scavenging.
How are people dying despite such bans and acts? Since February 2011, at least 25 men died in sewer lines in Tamil Nadu alone. Sunday’s deaths in Delhi would indicate that hundreds of manual scavengers, traditionally Valmiki dalits, have perished across India in the same period. Deaths from illnesses and infections do not even count but would probably be in the thousands. Laws divorced from contemporary reality are bound to fail. But this lesson continues unheeded in a new draft legislation the Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment has now tabled.

Despite flaws, the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill is better than its 1993 avatar. Investment in science and technology to plug failures in urban sewage management, and thereby end manual scavenging, failed to attract the committee’s attention. But to improve it Parliament has to first meet, and then find time to discuss, lest we are burdened with another toothless law.

When non-degradable solid wastes from homes, offices and roads find their way into a sewer and block them, it is to manual scavengers that cities turn to, again and again, to ensure that modern life can proceed without obstruction. We the people are thus equally at fault when a man has to descend into a sewer through a manhole. With the government let us all hold our heads down in shame. But let us also act and give them a break. A better life.