Putting a lid on it

Calamities feel like calamities only when the citizenry above a certain class deems them to be so. Earthquakes, tsunamis, epidemics – these do not discriminate, and hence become topics of 24-hour news coverage. But there are other calamities that claim far more lives. Surprisingly – or unsurprisingly – we hardly ever hear about them. Subhash Gatade, in this extract from Modinama: Issues That Did Not Matter (also in Hindi), talks about one such, reminding us in the process that apathy kills more than anything else. We are all complicit.

Silencing Caste, Sanitizing Oppression

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Photo-journalist Sudharak Olwe has an important photo essay called ‘In Search of Dignity and Justice’. It gives us a window into the lives of cleaners – sweepers and ragpickers. There are an enormous number of workers who are employed to clean our society. In the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation there are 30,000 conservancy workers. Olwe writes,

All of them are dalits, belonging to the lowest rung of the caste system. They have little or no education. Without exception, all of them despise their work. They are completely ignored or looked down upon with disgust by the rest of the society. They have to work in the midst of filth, with no protective gear, not even access to water to wash off the slime. Most of them are alcoholics.

The point about alcohol needs a caveat. The jobs are often so filthy that it would be remarkable if the workers did not turn to something like alcohol to numb the smell and the filth. It is impossible, workers say, to ‘enter the sea of filth’ without being dulled. Olwe goes into this kind of detail because he wants ‘citizens to see the workers and to acknowledge their presence and contribution’. The pictures in the exhibition do not sooth the eye. The country, Olwe writes, needs to acknowledge the contribution the workers ‘make for our health and survival, at the cost of their own health and survival’. One has to remain patient and not merely look at the pictures but look beyond them – reminding ourselves of the stark fact that millions and millions of people in this country, equal citizens of this republic, are condemned to live subhuman lives so that the rest of society can look ‘clean’. The workers are invisible, always invisible.

Olwe’s project reminds me of my own blood-curdling experience in 2004 with the death of workers in sewers. A newspaper reported on these deaths. A group of us talked to officials in the Safai Karamchari Commission, we met a few families who had lost their young sons in the sewers and we collected information about the working conditions of workers in the sewers. We began a campaign to make it clear that in Delhi alone about a hundred workers die each year in the sewers, a silent genocide of workers that is a blot on our democracy. We distributed handbills, staged a street play, held corner meetings and held a big public meeting at the Constitution Club (Delhi).

The handbill we created was titled ‘City Sewers or Deathtraps?’ It starts with details of deaths of two workers – Ala and Umesh – on 12 June 2004 while they were cleaning the sewer at Samaypur Badli, then moves on to the ‘powers that be who never appear to be unduly disturbed with such deaths’ and also questions the media which is ‘always on the prowl for sensational news’ but remains silent over such deaths. It also mentions why none of the Safai Karmacharis are even provided elementary instruments such as rope, box, oxygen cylinder, and masks at the time of descending down into the gutters. It ends with a few questions about sewer workers not getting adequate compensation in case of death or injury, nobody getting prosecuted for such deaths or calling such deaths ‘murders’.

Believe me, when I was re-reading the handbill, I felt that we were really naive as far as the issue was concerned. Naive about the gravity of the situation as it exists and also about the remedies which were and still are offered to ameliorate it.

Three years later, S. Anand did a story called ‘Life Inside a Black Hole’ for Tehelka. He wrote, ‘Beneath the glitter of India are dark alleys in which are trapped poisonous gases and millions of Dalits who do our dirty job in return for disease and untouchability.’ The data in the text is mind-numbing. Anand writes,

At least 22,327 Dalits of a sub-community die doing sanitation work every year. Safai Kamgar Vikas Sangh, a body representing sanitation workers of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), sought data under the Right to Information Act in 2006, and found that 288 workers had died in 2004-05, 316 in 2003-04, and 320 in 2002-03, in just 14 of the 24 wards of the BMC. About 25 deaths every month. These figures do not include civic hospital workers, gutter cleaners or sanitation workers on contract. Compare this with the 5,100 soldiers – army, police, paramilitaries – who have died between 1990 and 2007 combating militancy in Jammu & Kashmir.

The report underlined the fact that these are not the only deaths which can be attributed to exposure to poisonous gases. Most of the workers who work in sewers die before retirement. The average lifespan of a manhole worker is about 45 years. And as expected, if a worker does not die inside a manhole, then there is no monetary compensation. Such deaths are considered a logical fallout of occupational hazard for which the workers get a ‘risk allowance’, which is Rs. 50 in Delhi.

The report quotes Ashish Mittal, an occupational health physician who had done a study on sewer workers, who raises the situation of sewage workers in other countries. Manhole workers in these other countries, Mittal says, ‘are protected in bunny suits to avoid contact with contaminated water and sport a respiratory apparatus; the sewers are well-lit, mechanically aerated with huge fans and therefore are not so oxygen deficient. In Hong Kong, a sewer worker, after adequate training, needs at least 15 licences and permits to enter a manhole’. India is in a different situation:

The manhole worker wears nothing more than a loincloth or halfpants. In Delhi, since the directives of the National Human Rights Commission in October 2002, the majority of the DJB’s permanentworkers wear a ‘safety belt’. It’s a joke. This belt, connecting the worker through thick ropes to men standing outside, offers no protection from the gases and the sharp objects that assault the worker. At best, it helps haul them out when they faint or die.

The concluding part of the report emphasized that it is not the lack of funds or technology which poses problems. If technology could be used to launch satellites then why can it not be used for garbage and sewage? Detailing the allotment of thousands of crores of rupees for drainage and sewerage work, it posed a question: why does so much money get spent on laying and relaying pipes and drains that are designed to kill? ‘India’s urban planners, designers and technologists have never felt the need to conceive a humanfriendly system of managing garbage and sewage. Instead, they rely on an unending source of disposable, cheap, Dalit labour,’ he writes.

Perhaps the hiatus which separates the ‘almost invisible sewer worker’ mostly belonging to the Dalit caste and the articulate sections of our society and their complete detachment from the pain and agony they face could be described by a Radio Mirchi television commercial which found mention in the same writeup and the reaction (or rather its absence) which it generated. That commercial was on air for close to two years. It began with a song that emerged out of a manhole – Yeh suhana mausam, yeh khula aasmaan, kho gaye hum yahaan, haye, kho gaye hum yahaan … (This lovely weather, these wide open skies, we are lost in the bliss, oh, we are lost here …). Viewers could see a paan-chewing man in a safari suit wondering what keeps the man down in the manhole so happy that he should sing. Zooming in on the trousers and footwear left beside the manhole cover, the tagline said, Mirchi Sunnewaale … Always Khush. Conceived by Prasoon Joshi of McCann Erickson, the ad went on without a murmur of protest from viewers or civil rights groups.

Featured image for representational purposes. Source: flickr: Derek Blackadder.