More than 100 districts across the country reported themselves to be free of manual scavenging in a period of seven days (between July 27 and August 2) even as the Union government has said it is vigorously pursuing districts that have not yet done so to complete the procedure.
Responding to a question in the Lok Sabha, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said that as of August 2, a total of 639 districts had sent their self-declarations on being free of manual scavenging — a practice banned by law. On July 26, the government had told the Rajya Sabha that 530 districts had reported to be free of the practice.
Districts declaring themselves free of manual scavenging are doing so by determining the existence of insanitary latrines and then extrapolating whether the practice of manual scavenging is going on, senior government officials told The Hindu, adding that this is being done by the district-level sanitation committees.
The Union government has said that it has been communicating with districts for this purpose. “We have asked them to either declare themselves as manual scavenging-free or send information on insanitary latrines,” one Ministry official said.
As of July 26, the States and union territories with the highest pendency for this declaration were Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal among others.
Occupational practice
This approach of the Union government is being taken with a view that manual scavenging — as defined by it — no longer takes place in the country. The government has said that the practice is occupational and is defined as the regular practice of humans cleaning faecal matter by hand.
“Unsafe sewer and septic tank cleaning are not an everyday occupation. It is done only once or twice a year and the waste in there is anyway decomposed to a certain degree,” one official added, justifying why unsafe sewer cleaning cannot be classified as manual scavenging.
They also said that all people previously engaged in manual scavenging had already been identified — just over 58,000 people — and that all of them had been given the one-time compensation amount of ₹40,000. In reply to another question on Tuesday about the caste location of these people, the government insisted that the practice is “occupation-based” and not “caste-based”.
Data tabled by the government in Parliament in December 2021 had shown that of the 43,797 manual scavengers whose caste data were made available, over 97% were from Scheduled Castes, 421 were from Scheduled Tribes, and 431 were from Other Backward Classes.
The government has said that it is now focusing on ending the practice of unsafe sewer cleaning, which has killed at least 330 people in the last five years. The scheme envisions to mechanise all sewer management across the country and end the practice of unsafe sewer cleaning.
A part of the scheme’s component is to enumerate all sewer workers in the country to ensure no deaths occur while cleaning them by providing them access to subsidies for cleaning equipment and requiring contractors to provide safety gear.
