Can a ‘smart city’ co-exist with ethical and legal guilt of manual scavenging? Interestingly, this stark reality has been met with bold denial by leaders of smart cities. Cities of Bhopal, Indore, Bangalore, Surat, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Gurgaon and many others have been generously bestowed top ranks despite the muck they hide in the form of dehumanising and illegal manual scavenging. The priority for district governments under Smart City Mission is technology for services, governance for quality services, environment for clean air lifestyle, mobility and asset management, etc. Building city’s capacity for an inclusive human resource development is absent from the list leaving manual scavengers to continue as before in unhealthy conditions for want of alternative jobs or government support. Their average life span is reduced to 50 years as compared to 70 years for the rest of India despite the fact that they work in smart cities.
In 2021 the government told the Lok Sabha on the basis of a ‘mobile app’ launched in 2020, that there were no manual scavengers in India even though answering a separate question from TDP and BSP, Minister Athawale revealed that at least there were 321 reported deaths of manual scavengers while cleaning sewers and drains. In fact, the highest number died in 2019 when the first survey for ranking smart cities was being carried on. Just taking the 2020- 2022 data of deaths during septic tank cleaning, two manual scavengers Pramod Teji and Vishal Bamdev in their 30s died in Surat, Indore recorded 2 deaths both migrants from Bangladesh, in Chennai’s Sriperumbudur six scavengers died of inhaling toxic gas, Ahmedabad records a total seven deaths, Bengaluru records almost 1424 manual scavengers as per a Survey carried out by the state government Social Welfare Ministry and representatives of Safai Karmcharis in 2021-22. Bhopal has blatant continuance of manual scavengers and with adjoining Shivpuri can claim four out of six deaths of manual scavengers in the State. In Lucknow, Bhopal, Gorakhpur, Mathura and Bareilly a large number of manual scavengers are still cleaning human excreta due to old building structures where human waste directly goes to drains. Many are still treated as untouchables in rural MP, UP and Rajasthan with direct impacts upon labour supplied to smart cities. None of these smart cities have provided safety gears, medical coverage or insurance to those who contract fatal ailments or those who die. While the government was busy bestowing honours upon doctors and Army officers these grassroots were ignored despite their unstoppable task continuing even during the calamitous pandemic.
Being one of the most hard-hitting questions, the smart cities mission has ingeniously suppressed it under glittering ‘digital models’ considered ‘smart’. The so called ‘engineering metaphor’ prepared by big-budget IT Companies is by now established in its perpetual disconnect with social and caste realities nibbling progress and harmony at the grassroots. A Dec. 2021 data released from the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment reveals a shocking figure of 58,098 manual scavengers in the country and a large number of them are employed in smart cities. Experts on the ground such as Dr. Vikram Singh, who conducted an intensive study between 2010 and 2015 through visits and NGO records reveals their number to exceed the estimated 6.76 lacs which was reported by the Ministry in 2002-03. Government estimates are restricted to bucket carriers in dry latrines but since then, these manual scavengers have shifted to sewers, septic tanks, drain cleaners and wet garbage workers where they are subjected to the same dehumanizing and unhealthy conditions in addition to pre-existing social discrimination. While I am writing this piece, the Safai Karmcharis or sanitation workers of Gurgaon are up in arms against the government which according to them has been unresponsive to their demands. This remains the unresolved darkest side of most smart cities.
For the rising upper classes, a morning walk in the wilderness of city parks is a necessary rejuvenation. Rarely do they see those hundreds of boys hauling through heaps of garbage spread around at the hidden end of their beautiful plush locality. These narrow back lanes which are used as garbage dumps are shortcuts to neighbourhood markets or metro points and those who pass by cover themselves up with a double mask to avoid the stench and germs. When I think of these secluded city corners invisible to the district administration, I am reminded of an early nineteenth-century Sufi Saint Baba Jaan who reflects beautifully on the unspeakable sufferings lying suppressed beneath these garbage dump yards. She had made the Char Bawdi (Four Wells) of Pune’s British Army Cantonment her home despite her devotees giving her better places. All the Pune city’s trash and the animal carcass from the neighbourhood slaughterhouses was dumped at Char Bawdi. She probably found this place as the best platform to address discrimination, destitution and inequity, ‘the beginning and the end of all human beings irrespective of size or status is the same, the difference only exists during the journey’. This form of discrimination is spiritually incorrect for any society. She also used concepts of ‘Fana’ and ‘Baqaa’ to make people understand that the arrogance that sustains superiority in society is an obstruction to progress, which can only be achieved ‘through a process of self-annihilation or Fana’. It is only after this is done that boundaries melt away and humans may gain a clearer vision to see the Almighty in fellow beings or achieve a state of Buqaa’. This spiritual argument may not appeal to the digital missionaries but may help to approach this human problem with basic human tools that weave social apparel before one knocks for legal deliverance.
The Cyber City of Gurugram was bestowed with ‘Garbage Free City Award’ by the MoHUA in November 2021. However, an entirely different story sullies the ground. The city’s Manhattan called the Cyber City has more than 20 thousand small and big dhabas (makeshift food points), restaurants, and home delivery kitchens within a diameter of 10-15 km but not even half have bins for their garbage disposal. The Ecogreen Co. hired by the government for house-to-house garbage pick-up arrives every morning with its non-stop noisy doggerel, seen as a bad imitation of Sikkim’s premiere tintinnabulate garbage collection trucks. As this noisy cavalcade enters a locality all online meetings are silenced, seminars are shut and work from home takes a pause. Other than these prescribed locality houses, garbage from markets and also from very large unauthorized but densest housing areas within the cyber city dump all their waste in an abandoned corner. Most empty plots or connecting passages get filled with garbage every night. The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram workers with the help of some good Samaritans have approached the Ward Councillor and the district authorities for their modest demands of garbage bins and safety equipment or at least impose penalties on unbridled garbage dump by food points using their powers under Swachh Bharat Mission. This has met with a habitual impassiveness towards grassroots. The situation is worse in other sectors where there are innumerable pathological labs and hospitals throw their trash in the open.
For reasons best known to the government, the definition of manual scavengers has been so narrowed down in law that most of those trapped in this inhuman ordeal are kept out of any legitimate support offered in law. The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act 1993 had defined the expression ‘manual scavenging’ limited to ‘a person engaged in or employed in carrying human excreta’. The 2013 Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act (PEMSRA) broadened it to, “manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of or otherwise handling in any manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit into which the human excreta from the insanitary latrine is disposed of or on a railway track or in such other spaces or premises, as the Central Government or the State Government may notify, before the excreta fully decomposes in such a manner as may be prescribed and the expression manual scavenging shall be construed accordingly.” Despite an extended definition, much depends upon how governments and the judiciary understands and interprets scavenging in a modern city where the state of scavengers remains unchanged. The National Safai Karamchari Finance and Development Corporation (NSKFDC) conducted a survey in 2019 under the aegis of Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Of the 87,913 people registered for manual scavenging in the 170 districts across 18 states only 42,303 people or less than half were ‘acknowledged’ by the state governments as manual scavengers. A Survey across the state of Uttar Pradesh, which tops in the number of manual scavengers and also in villages practicing untouchability found that Rs.40,000 promised to those who give up scavenging did not reach even half of them. The Supreme Court Judgement in Safai Karamchari Andolan v. Union of India, (2014) laid down a compensation of Rs. 10 Lakh to families of all the workers who died in the process of sewer cleaning yet most families were found waiting to receive the amount due to them. It is ironical how little the government has done at this level in creating even a mild discourse for alternative jobs or regular medical checkup to protect them from severe health issues like asthma, eye infections, and intestinal damage that they become vulnerable to.
A number of international organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), World Health Organization(WHO), UN Women and the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have addressed this concern in some of the most affected areas. The five top ranking states in manual scavenging ie; Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat have demonstrated a pathetic management on the ground and Haryana’s defiance to norms is going unnoticed. Few facts which should be placed before smart city planners:
Most of those employed in manual scavenging are Dalits (lowest in caste hierarchy)
They work without safeguard equipment (boots, gloves, masks, caps) against hazardous rotting animal and human waste, inside toxic areas in septic tanks and sewers or hand management of non-household garbage dump-yards.
Considering their health they need additional sanitation materials like soaps and detergents but no such allowance is given to them.
There is no regular health checkup legally required to be conducted for such workers both under the Factory Act as well as the 2013 Act.
They are not employed on defined ‘term contracts’ but simply ‘temporary’. This exonerates the state from any substantial support to them while they are made to live under an illusion of a government job. Their retirement after inhaling the city’s worst toxins throughout their life comes without benefits of pension, provident fund, group insurance, medical card or gratuity.
Human and administrative puniness has failed a strong law. The PEMSRA 2013 has provided for the appointment of Inspectors under sec. 20, who would strictly supervise compliance to this Act. This Inspector has wide-ranging powers similar to those under sec. 94 of CrPC 1973 for visit, search, and seizure of any office material, documents, registers, record of wages or notices on having slightest indication that such an offence has been committed and its mandatory to provide him all this required information as it is under sec.175 and sec.176 of IPC 1860.
The Act has further laid down in Chapter VI that The Chief Executive Officer of the Municipality, in whose jurisdiction the survey is undertaken, shall be responsible for accurate and timely completion of the survey. The State Government may confer, on an Executive Magistrate, the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class for the trial of offences under this Act with powers under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. These offences may be tried summarily (quick trials) and every offence under this Act shall be cognizable and non-bailable.
Further to this under sec.24, every State Government should constitute a Vigilance Committee for each district and each Sub-Division. The Committee is so comprehensive and inclusive in its constitution that even if half of its form is implemented, the broad daylight defiance of law in smart cities would send most special purpose vehicles behind bars. These Committees led by the District Magistrate as its Chairperson, ex officio, all Scheduled Castes Assembly members from the district, the district Superintendent of Police and members of Panchayat, Ward, Scheduled Castes Welfare Board, district-level officers of Departments and agencies who, in the opinion of the District Magistrate have a significant role to play in the implementation of this Act. Yet, while ranking smart cities, this has not even been considered as a factor for considering eligibility as the byword to the ‘smart-list’ is ‘by hook or by crook just get there’. Big grants come to states on reaching these ranks.
State governments have been jumping the gun by launching mobile applications to identify unsanitary conditions and replace manual scavenging, which is the task assigned to Inspectors under the 2013 Act. Indore, Bangalore, Lucknow and other smart cities have been making a beeline to procure‘Bandicoot’, a manhole cleaning robot. From preliminary tests conducted by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation this robot works with a camera in front, can go deep into septic tanks and can clean a manhole in 45 minutes. It costs 35 lacs. Like most apps, this app may also need additional tech support, repairs, energy and a streamlined maintenance care. The cost could easily be doubled. Yet considered to be the best answer to dehumanizing manual scavenging it leaves behind the standard problem unattended ie; What are the alternative employment avenues for those who were so poor to have opted for manual scavenging?
Would the government spend half the amount its spending on ephemeral technology of smart cities on rehabilitating these manual scavengers and put their district administration to better compliance to the demands of 2013 Act. The latter is an everlasting return to country’s governance.
The author is president of Network Asia Pacific Disaster Research Group, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, and former Professor of Administrative Reforms and Emergency Governance at JNU. The views expressed are personal. This piece is part of a series of five articles on ‘Grassroots Concerns of Smart Cities Mission’.
