THE WORST JOB IN INDIA.
Stay with me till the end. It is going to be the most shocking thing you read on internet today.
I am very sure that no one from India would tell you about this particular job, which I’m going to describe further. This is because everyone hates it, hates to even talk about it or discuss it widely.
I’m talking about the job of “Manual Scavenging”.
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Scavenging is the practice of manual cleaning of human excreta from service/ dry latrines. The scavengers crawl into the dry latrines and collect the human excreta with their bare hands, carry it as head-load in a container to dispose it off.
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Hundreds of thousands of impoverished “low caste” Indians are being forced to clean human excreta from dry toilets and open drains, despite a ban on the discriminatory and undignified practice, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
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In rural areas they are often given leftover food, old clothes and access to land instead of wages - all at the discretion of households they serve.
Below is someone’s real life story, not a mere example:
Saraswati doesn’t remember the last time her bare hands touched the statues of the gods lying on a shaky wooden plank in a corner of her one-room house in Farrukhnagar village of Ghaziabad district. She doesn’t remember the last time she prayed or fasted.
She says every part of her body stinks—stinks even after multiple baths.
Every morning 57-year-old Saraswati and almost 50 other women in the village leave their houses to physically remove human excrement from dry toilets of higher-caste families.
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They are what the country calls the manual scavengers. In India, the people employed to clean such toilets have always been the untouchables or dalits—and 98% of them are women.
Saraswati is one. With a small mouth, deep sunken eye sockets, wide nose and sun-tanned wheatish skin, Saraswati’s face is a knot of depression and a lifelong angst.
People like Saraswati aren’t invisible. According to the 2011 census, there are 750,000 families that still work as manual scavengers.
But activists working for the community estimate the number to be higher, around 1.3 million, especially because the government hasn’t included the railway employees who have to clean excrement from the railway tracks, as Indian trains lack a proper waste-disposal system. Yet, the administration turns a blind eye to them.
The 96-page report, “Cleaning Human Waste: ‘Manual Scavenging,’ Caste, and Discrimination in India,” documents the coercive nature of manual scavenging.
Selected Testimonies from the Report:
“The first day when I was cleaning the latrines and the drain, my foot slipped and my leg sank in the excrement up to my calf. I screamed and ran away. Then I came home and cried and cried. I knew there was only this work for me.”
— Sona, Bharatpur city, Rajasthan, June 2013
“I clean in 20 houses. They give me roti [flat bread]. They don’t give more than two rotis, but they do give us something. My husband does farm work, but work in the fields does not come every day. If I do this work, at least we will have something to eat.”
— Shanti, Mainpuri district, Uttar Pradesh, January 2014
“I studied commerce and banking, but I couldn’t find work. Even though I am educated, the village council hired me to clean toilets because I am from this community.”
— Kailash Pokerji Kundare, Jalgaon district, Maharashtra, March 2014
“We went to the panchayat [local council] members and said, please give us some work. The work they gave, my work, was to clean the gutter, clean excrement from roads, clean the toilets, clean the village, and remove garbage. It is our caste. They will not give us any better work to do. Nothing that would give us dignity.”
— Gopal Harilal Bohit, Jalgaon district, Maharashtra, March 2014
“They called our men and said ‘If you don’t start sending your women to clean our toilets, we will beat them up.
“I had to work with my head veiled. During the rains, my clothes would become drenched with excrement. They would not dry. The house would smell. I started to get skin diseases and even to lose my hair.”
— Badambai, Neemuch district, Madhya Pradesh, January 2014
“The manual carrying of human feces is not a form of employment, but an injustice akin to slavery. It is one of the most prominent forms of discrimination against Dalits, and it is central to the violation of their human rights.”
— Ashif Shaikh, founder of Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, a grassroots campaign to end manual scavenging, May 2014
References:
- Sulabh International Social Service Organisation
- India’s great shame
- Manual scavenging still rampant in India: Rights group
- Manual scavenging: The worst job in India; PS: it’s illegal too
- India’s low castes still forced to clean human excreta, says HRW
- In pictures: India’s ‘untouchable’ scavengers
- India: Caste Forced to Clean Human Waste