-The Indian Express In the recent exercise, state governments, tasked with verifying 54,929 manual scavengers identified across 170 select districts in stage one of the counting process, have confirmed involvement of only 25,015 people in the job in the final verification stage. New Delhi: State governments have denied the existence of more than half the number of people identified as being involved in manual scavenging in the course of a Central...
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Understanding the Problems of India's Sanitation Workers -Nirat Bhatnagar
-TheWire.in While no one can argue that India may moving in the right direction in terms of sanitation, all is not well. Despite increasing focus by the government and programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, unsafe sanitation work, loosely captured under the catch-all phrase manual scavenging, still exists in India. There are five million people employed in sanitation work of some sort in India with about two million of them working...
More »India's abject failure on manual scavenging -Partha Pratim Mitra
-The Telegraph Despite being prohibited the practice remains widespread and unmodernised, and violators are not punished The death of five sanitation workers in Delhi is a grim reminder of the hostile conditions that confront manual scavenging in India. manual scavenging has been prohibited by law. Yet, it remains unchecked. There is also a distinct lack of effort to make this objectionable occupation safe and dignified. This is the net result of institutional...
More »Manual scavenger count rises, despite ban -Basant Kumar Mohanty
-The Telegraph The number, according to the figures reported by the states in 2015, was around 13,770. The latest survey found 20,596 manual scavengers in 2018 New Delhi: manual scavenging has been banned since 1993 but there has been little impact on the ground. The latest data from a survey conducted by the National Safai Karamcharis Finance & Development Corporation this year on manual scavengers has found their number has risen by over...
More »'When a brother goes down a sewer to clean it, we look the other way' -Sudha G Tilak
-The Hindu Business Line Hounded for her documentary on the horrors of manual scavenging, filmmaker Divya Bharathi holds up a mirror to social indifference A conspiracy of silence — that’s how filmmaker Divya Bharathi describes the uneasy quiet that shrouds the death of men and children in sewage tanks. Earlier this month, when six men choked to death in Delhi, the reaction was on expected lines — nothing beyond knee-jerk moves, she...
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