Telangana High Court takes suo motu PIL over deaths of scavengers

Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court has taken up the case of deaths of two scavengers while they were cleaning a septic tank at Kondapur of Hyderabad in the last week of November as a suo motu PIL.

Based on a newspaper report, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, sent a note to the registrar judicial of the High Court, expressing deep anguish on the state administration in permitting manual scavenging despite the fact that the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013 completely prohibits manual scavenging.

In the note, Justice Bhuyan also recalled the directions of the Supreme Court that the state should pay a compensation of Rs 10 lakh to the dependant of the person who died while doing sewerage work in 1993, irrespective of the place of work. It further said the state should conduct a survey to find out how many persons died while performing scavenging work and pay compensation of Rs 10 lakh each to their dependents and make all efforts to rehabilitate the families of such manual scavengers.

The court made the chief secretary, the principal secretary of municipal administration, the commissioner of GHMC, commissioner of labour department, district collector of Medchal-Malkajgiri and the managing director of HMWS&SB as respondents in the PIL.