Dina Thanthi was the only Tamil newspaper on his list. Vidya, an assistant executive engineer with the Solid Waste Management Department, says however that publicity material had been pasted on auto rickshaws around the city.Ī corporation official who didn’t want to be named also said that the survey had been advertised in six newspapers. Samuel, who is also volunteering for the Chennai segment of the survey, says there has hardly been any publicity or awareness generated that a survey of this nature is underway. Just Rs 7 per day from readers like you will keep The Wire going. For example, six districts in Tamil Nadu are on the list – Tiruvallur, Tiruchirappalli, Chennai Madurai, Coimbatore and Kanyakumari – but others, like Ramanathapuram, where manual scavenging still exists on a large scale according to activists working in these areas, have been left out. But there are concerns that the exercise is once again bypassing the people it is meant for. In 2018, the Centre initiated a resurvey in 18 states, covering 164 districts. Of the 323 fatalities reported across the country since 1993, 144 – 44.5% – were from Tamil Nadu. In January 2018, data submitted in the Rajya Sabha by Hardeep Singh, the Union minister of housing and urban affairs, noted that Tamil Nadu topped the chart in manual scavenger deaths. “They threatened to arrest them and took signatures from them on paper stating that they were not manual scavengers,” says Samuel. However, on the pretext of verifying these names, government officials allegedly harassed and intimidated manual scavengers. It identified 3,032 manual scavengers and submitted the data to the government. Again.Īfter the 2015 survey, the SKA surveyed eight districts in the state to replicate Tamil Nadu’s numbers. “My immediate and extended families are also in the occupation, yet none of them were ever surveyed.”Īlso read: After 25 Years of Broken Promises, India is Counting its Manual Scavengers. “I belong to the Arunthathiyar caste, like many manual scavengers,” he elaborated. Samuel also says that the state never conducted a proper survey in the first place. The new number was 462 manual scavengers, as of 2015.Īccording to every activist we spoke to, this number is not even a tenth of the actual number of manual scavengers in the state. However, after the MS Act took effect in 2013, the state conducted a census-like survey to identify manual scavengers. Like many others, he remains unaware of the rehabilitation package as described under the Prohibition of Employment of Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 (MS Act).Īccording to the Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011, Tamil Nadu had only 334 manual scavengers. Selvaraj has been working as a manual scavenger for more than 15 years. Selvaraj’s story is symptomatic of the failures of the Tamil Nadu government’s programme for identifying and rehabilitating manual scavengers. Samuel also told him about an ongoing survey to identify manual scavengers being conducted by the National Safai Karamchari Finance and Development Corporation (NSKFDC), a wholly government owned body under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Samuel, the Tamil Nadu convenor of the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), an organisation that works to eradicate manual scavenging. Selvaraj was told about the compensation to which he was entitled by V. “First they fell unconscious, and then they were electrocuted,” he says. He looked apologetic, his head low and hidden behind a cap, when asked if he also cleaned septic tanks.įollowing the death of his family members, Selvaraj has been anxious whenever he has had to enter a manhole. The 33-year-old, a corporation employee who cleans open drains, had come with his workmates to the Chennai Corporation Zone 1 office on April 7 to identify themselves as manual scavengers. Selvaraj* discovered that his family was entitled to a compensation of Rs 10 lakh for the deaths of his father-in-law and wife’s cousin when they were cleaning manholes in 2003.
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