Making Waste-removal Caste-neutral

What is the issue?

• With Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), there is also a need for making the waste-removal profession caste-neutral.

A clean village exists because an ‘unclean’ caste is forced to absorb the ‘filth’ of the village.

What is SBA?

• Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) was a nationwide initiative to clean public spaces.
• It aimed at inspiring the public to voluntarily clean public spaces as a service to the nation.
• The government is resolved to accomplish the vision of a clean India by 2019.
• The campaign initially highlighted images of celebrities “voluntarily” sweeping the streets.
• Concurrently, municipalities began to employ more contractual labourers.

What are the concerns?

• Deaths - The campaign hardly addresses a reworking of the underground sewerage system.
• Many labourers have died recently while cleaning jammed manholes that open into the sewerage system.
• The disturbing fact is that these deaths have a caste pattern.
• In 2017, over 300 cases of such deaths were reported mostly from particular caste groups.
• Role - The campaign burdens the contractual labourer with an ‘exclusive’ right to cleaning public spaces.
• But it makes it a voluntary act for the ‘public’ to not defecate, urinate or litter in random spaces.
• There is a lack of punitive measures to urge public to follow healthy practices.
• Attitude - In India, waste carries the stigma that is attached to pollution and caste.
• It is thus carried on to the process of removal (‘scavenging’) and the occupation (‘scavenger’).
• The waste remover in India is not a professional, like in the West.
• Collection - In the past, municipalities erected bins in common places for the shops and households to dispose of waste.
• Under SBA, these bins were the first to be removed, as it offered door-to-door collection.
• Members from the households now bring unsegregated garbage which is collected by the workers.
• The workers collect them and it is then sent to the composting yard where workers segregate the waste.
• Manually segregating the waste at the landfill compromises their hygiene and health.
• Caste - The door-to-door service has several darker undertones.
• Until they were banned in 1993, dry latrines were emptied through a similar door-to-door service.
• The workers blow whistle to indicate their arrival to the households.
• Not only this, it also announced the presence of a lower caste person.
• This was in order to warn caste Hindus from crossing their paths.
• In the colonial past and even now in some places, toilet locations are planned with caste notions.

What is the Western approach?

• Approach - The Western model aims at removing waste from the public gaze.
• Stopping the spread of disease was the primary intention in the West.
• However, sanitation is now largely an extension of visual aesthetics as well.
• Sanitation now means more the absence of “filthiness all around us”.
• The West introduced technologies to systematically remove waste.
• London - The Londoners experienced the ‘Great Stink’ in 1858.
• The government then realised the need for a holistic sewerage plan that become part of the water infrastructure.
• It aimed at removing filth and treating waste from the river Thames in a sustainable way.
• Soon, the construction of toilets in households and shops became mandatory.

What should India do?

• Similarities between secular SBA and casteist form of manual scavenging are evident, but unnoticed.
• While cleaning is a voluntary ‘service’ for caste Hindus, collecting and disposing waste remains a ‘duty’ for particular castes.
• Thus the stigma attached to sanitary labour, place and waste should be critically addressed.
• Any tangible achievement of a clean India is possible only by caste-neutralising these professions.
• Adoption of advanced technologies in waste management, collection and disposal can go a long way.

Source: The Hindu