Hyderabad: “There is a criminal silence today in India about the ignominy and cruelty that surrounds the lives of manual scavengers”, said Bhasha Singh, who wrote the original book called Ashuddha Bharat translated into Telugu with the same title.
Bhasha Singh was speaking at Lamakan on Saturday, at a book launch function attended by a galaxy of speakers including Magsaysay award winners Bezawada Wilson and Carnatic vocalist T.M. Krishna.
Ms Singh said there are scores of people who are born into manual scavenging, who live their entire lives cleaning the waste of fellow humans. What is appalling is that even pregnant women are brought in to clean sewers and septic tanks, public toilets and vast tracts of open drains, she said.
She added that it sometimes stinks so much that many who work with turbans on their heads while cleaning dread taking off the turbans after a day’s work because they can’t eat due to the smell.
Noted Carnatic vocalist T.M Krishna spoke with restraint saying the book helps you see how the scourge of manual scavenging is perpetrated mostly by the upper castes. “A society has to build different dialogues and conversations and build a society that is free from this disgrace and scourge, he said.
Bezawada Wilson –the National Convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan - took centrestage when he rose to speak. Hailing from the community of scavengers, he said it is not enough to talk about Swach Bharat and levy Swach Bharat cess without changing the system of caste biase that has stayed for over 5,000 years.
He said over Rs 570 crore had been collected so far since the 2013 budget but governments have still not wiped out manual scavenging. Despite the cess for Swacch Bharat, he said the ex-gratia for workers dying due to scavenging was not even Rs 20,000 when, in fact, the ex-gratia sanctioned is at least Rs 3 lakh. And this is despite the fact that even after the Supreme Court had ordered the government to give ex-gratia of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 15 lakh, he said.
Wilson added that 12 crore toilets were being built along with plans for Smart Cities – including in AP and Telangana. But despite all that, India is still lacking a system of drainage which uses technology, instead of manual labour, to drain out human waste.
